Art of War (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (2 page)

1905
In Tokyo, the first English translation of
The Art of War,
by Captain E. F. Calthrop, appears under the title
Sonshi,
the Japanese form of Sun Tzu.

1910
Lionel Giles publishes his English translation of
The Art of War
.

1972
An archaeological dig unearths a lost text of
The Art of War
in the Shantung province of modern China. The text contains long sections of thirteen chapters that are already known as well as passages from five lost chapters. The texts appear to have been buried around 140 B.C.

INTRODUCTION

WAR IS A HOWLING, BAYING JACKAL. Or is it the animating storm? Suicidal madness or the purifying fire? An imperialist travesty? Or the glorious explosion of a virile nation made manifest upon the planet? In all recorded history, this debate is recent, as is the idea of peace to describe an active state happier than a mere interregnum between fisticuffs. Astounding as it may seem, war has consistently won the debate. In fact, it never had serious competition—not until August 24, 1898, anyway, when Czar Nicholas II of Russia called for an international conference specifically to discuss “the most effectual means” to “a real and durable peace.” That was the first time nations would gather without a war at their backs to discuss how war might be prevented systematically. Nicholas was successful. His first Peace Conference was held in 1899. It was followed by a second, in 1907. These meetings gave rise to a process in which the world gained a common code of international laws.

It was a moment when peace and the trials of war were under the microscope of the civilized world. Off in a very quiet corner of this stage, there also appeared two scholars: one, a ghost, Sun Wu—this is Sun Tzu’s actual name; Sun is the family name, and Tzu an honorific—a member of a Chinese clan of experts on arms and fighting, who had lived some 2,400 years earlier; the other, a librarian and student of the Chinese classics, Lionel Giles, who published his translation of
The Art of War
in 1910. He, too, was a son of eminence—his father was the great sinologist Herbert Giles—and he transported Sun Tzu’s urgent injunctions on the nature of war across vast reaches of time and culture; the task was extraordinary, the impetus behind it almost saintly. The influence of the work of these two men colors our lives even as this text is written. But it did not come without effort, and even today, with a century of English-language scholarship on Asian literature, religion, and societies behind us, there is still much to puzzle the general reader.

World War I and its carnage would soon burst upon the world, leaving an estimated 25 million dead, twice the tally for
all
the wars of nineteenth-century Europe. Nicholas and his entire class would disappear amid the terrors of revolution in Russia, China, and Mexico, to name but the grandest uprisings. World War II would follow with no fewer than 60 million dead, and on its heels a whirl of wars for independence, civil wars, and the surrogate wars of Vietnam, Korea, Africa, the Balkans, and the Middle East—all in all, a century-long testament to the failure of humanity’s best intentions. It would be an odd soul who did not find himself feeling as Abraham Lincoln did in his Second Inaugural Address, on March 4, 1865, as the American Civil War was ending: “Fondly do we hope—fervently do we pray—that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away.”

Yet it takes little experience to understand the futility of belligerence alone, as Sun Tzu wrote: “[H]e who is destined to defeat first fights and afterwards looks for victory” (chap. IV, paragraph 15). On the world front or the level of the individual, the issue is not force, not arms—it is strategy. In his study of Mao Tse-tung, modern warfare’s most ardent student of Sun Tzu, Robert Payne notes: “Sun Wu’s ideas on war are exceedingly adaptable, . . . nearly all of them demonstrating how the commander of a small force can overcome a powerful enemy, given suitable conditions of his own making. These apothegms have a peculiarly Chinese flavor, hardheaded, deeply philosophical, often showing a disturbing knowledge of the human soul under stress” (Robert Payne,
Mao Tse-tung
; see “For Further Reading”). But how did Sun Tzu know what he knew? Where did he get his information? Can we trust it?

Sometime (most historians suggest about 500 B.C.) during the Spring and Autumn period of the Eastern Chou Dynasty (see section “The World of Sun Tzu and
The Art of War
”), a strikingly serious fellow, dressed in simple monkish gray, the living man named Sun Tzu, contemplated the madness of his times as deeply and clearly as he could. According to modern Chinese scholars, Sun Tzu belonged to an extended family whose members for generations had made their living as military advisers. The revelations Sun Tzu provides us would have been a combination of the journeyman ideas taught (and preserved) by his clan, as well as his own. He would also have been imbued with the ideas we associate with Taoism, which were very much a part of the times.

Foremost among them for a supremely disciplined military adviser like Sun Tzu would have been two commands, both of which required methodical and deliberate decisions. First is the mandate for the strong and the knowledgeable to help the weak. Evening out the playing field carried the charge of religious duty for these advisers. Along with that comes the question of virtue, “the mandate of Heaven.” That meant Sun Tzu would have assessed the intrinsic virtue of the weaker and the stronger powers, adhering to the rule of
t’ien ming
, “the mandate of Heaven,” as described in the Classical Chinese text
The Book of Documents
. As Burton Watson explains, would-be conquerors, “by their just and virtuous actions, receive from Heaven—a vague, half-personalized spiritual power which rules the universe—a command to set up a new rule. So long as the successive leaders of the new dynasty continue to follow the virtuous course which first entitled their predecessors to the mandate, Heaven will continue to sanction their power.” But if they do not maintain virtue, all bets are off: If they sink into “negligence and evil,” Heaven will bestow its sanction upon another group of leaders. “In other words, it is virtue alone that entitles a ruler to rule, and when he sets aside virtue, he sets aside the right to call himself a sovereign. The throne is conferred . . . only for as long as the dynasty proves worthy of it” (Watson,
Early Chinese Literature
). Sun Tzu would have considered these issues quite seriously. Even given the frailty of all human flesh, sayings equivalent to our common phrases “It’s not my problem” and “It’s just business” or even the excuse of the “tyranny of the bottom line” would have been unthinkable.

The resulting document—for Sun Tzu was a man of the aristocracy and could write—is a treatise that has come down through history to be called
Sun-tzu ping-fa
,
Sun Tzu on the Art of War
, just
Sun Tzu
(the customary nomenclature the Chinese use instead of a book title), or, as in many modern editions,
The Art of War
. For Sun Tzu, war, like most of mankind’s social, biological, and financial activities, followed certain patterns that can be distilled into laws. He codified his observations into the first military treatise in recorded history. Significantly, he was not only the first to teach that the side that controls those laws of engagement wins, but the long-term influence of his and certain other texts meant that Imperial China, once it had taken shape, rarely needed to wage war outside its boundaries. At the time Lionel Giles made his translation, in fact, China was considered something of a teddy bear among the bellicose hotheads of empire. So Giles in this translation is braiding the two warring streams of thought about war—that it is senseless butchery and that it serves as a sacred restorative to the body politic—into a work that cautions against war, then argues for how it may best be carried out. This is an extraordinary document at an extraordinary turning point in world history.

Equally important, though perhaps startling to Western ears, is the statement that Sun Tzu was a humanist. He adv-cated waging fast, offensive wars, once one had made deliberate calculations and decided that war was the only reasonable alternative. Why? Fewer deaths, less destruction of the countryside, and thus less hardship on the farmers who lived there and worked the land. This was humanism with an edge, however, since farmers and peasants also serve as conduits for information and sources for food and shelter for armies in the field. Moreover—and this has inspired American as well as Asian generals—Sun Tzu taught that the less destruction of the land, people, and infrastructure, the more the victor would gain, and the easier it would be to convert the vanquished into citizens, not rebels.

A digression on the major centers of civilization might be helpful here: At the time Sun Tzu trod the earth, China would have been evolving for nearly two millennia. Europe and Russia were barbarian lands and Mesopotamia was in decline, but Athens was at its ascendance—this is about the time of the Peloponnesian Wars. India was well developed, with a highly organized social structure. Indeed, though it would fix on class issues more than actual combat, by about 300 B.C. what might be called the Indian
Art of War
, the
Artha Sastra
, would be composed by Kautilya.

Thanks to the intrepid work of anthropologists and archaeologists, not to mention the Chinese passion for compiling historical records, we know something of the times and the culture of 500 B.C. China already possessed a written language and most of the characteristics that made it one of the most advanced empires on the planet. Well before 1600 B.C., the Chinese had invented and were using metal casting. By Sun Tzu’s time, though they did not work gold, they produced exquisite jade objects, jewelry, unsurpassed ceramics, and huge bronze statues. They had horse-drawn chariots and formidable weapons of war.

The Chinese were not explorers or wanderers. Others, often barbarians, came to them, especially along the fabled Silk Road, but the Chinese did not travel much until historical times. Early on, they founded scores of complex cities, arranged with three well-defined areas situated within or behind retaining walls; these protective walls often figure in Sun Tzu’s calculations. For example, the wall of Chou was made of pounded earth 30 feet high and 40 feet thick. Any general would have to think hard about surmounting that! The typical urban layout, according to historian J. M. Roberts (
A Short History of the World
), was “a small enclosure where the aristocracy lived, a larger one, inhabited by specialized craftsmen and merchants, and the fields outside which fed the city.” Commerce bustled and mercantile streets included jewelry, food and clothing shops, and “taverns, gambling houses, and brothels.”