The Art of War

1st century A.D. The Wu Yueh Ch’un-ch’iu appears. It contains a biography of Sun Tzu that details
his fabled arrival into the service of King Ho Lu. The Wu Yueh Ch’un-ch’iu is entertaining, but it is
most likely a romanticized embellishment of the tales found in the Shih Chi.
1772 The Art of War is translated into French by Father J. J. Amiot, a Jesuit who learned of Sun Tzu
and The Art of War while he was a missionary in China. The translation is probably read by Napoleon.
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.

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INTRODUCTION
It is mere illusion and pretty sentiment to expect much from mankind if it forgets how to make
war. As yet no means are known which call so much into action as a great war, that rough
energy born of the camp, that deep impersonality born of hatred, that conscience born of
murder and cold-bloodedness, that fervor born of effort in the annihilation of the enemy, that
proud indifference to loss, to one’s own existence, to that of one’s fellows, to that earthquake-
like soul-shaking which a people needs when it is losing its vitality.
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human (1878)
War . . . is in its essence, and it is a main condition of its success, to kindle into fierce exercise
among great masses of men the destructive and combative passions—passions as fierce and
malevolent as that with which the hound hunts the fox to its death. . . . Destruction is one of its
chief ends. Deception is one of its chief means, and one of the great arts of skillful generalship
is to deceive in order to destroy. . . . It would be difficult to conceive a disposition more remote
from the morals of ordinary life, not to speak of Christian ideals. . . . Hardly any one will be so
confident of the virtue of his rulers as to believe that every war . . . is just and necessary.
W. E. H. Lecky, The Map of Life (1899)
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

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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

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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