The Seven Military Classics of Ancient China

by Ralph D Sawyer

  Institute a Strong Bureaucracy and Impose Controls Although government must be founded on moral standards and should assiduously practice virtue, it can only govern effectively by creating and systematically imposing a system of rewards and punishments. These policies must invariably be implemented by a strong bureaucracy composed of talented men selected carefully after insightful evaluation. Values inimical to the state, such as private standards of courage, should be discouraged. However, tolerance must be extended to allies and efforts made to avoid violating their local customs.

  Rewards and punishments must be clear, immediate, and universal so they will become part of the national consciousness. Although laws and punishments should be restrained and never multiplied, those necessary to the state's survival should be rigorously enforced. Punishments should extend to the very highest ranks and rewards to the lowest.48 Only then will they prove effective and will people be motivated to observe them regardless of their positions and of whether their potential transgressions might be detectable.

  Personal Example and Sympathy of the Ruler The ruler, and by implication all the members of government, should intensively cultivate the universally acknowledged virtues: benevolence, righteousness, loyalty, credibility, sincerity, courage, and wisdom. Because all men love profits, pleasure, and virtue and detest death, suffering, and evil, the ruler should develop and foster these in common with the people. Ideally, he must perceive their needs and desires and avail himself of every possible source of information to understand their condition. Personal emotions should never be allowed to interfere with the impartial administration of government, nor should the ruler's pleasures or those of the bureaucracy become excessive, thereby impoverishing the people and depriving them of their livelihood. The ruler should strive to eliminate every vestige of evil in order to forge a persona that contrasts dramatically with an enemy's perversity, vividly presenting the people diametrically opposed alternatives. Righteousness must always dominate personal emotions and desires, and the ruler should actively share both hardship and pleasure with his people and also project an image of doing so. This will bind the people to him and guarantee their allegiance to the state.

  Total Warfare One reason the Six Secret Teachings was excoriated over the centuries is because the T'ai Kung insisted on utilizing every available method to achieve victory, as did the historical figure-as conventionally portrayed-in the Chou effort to conquer the Shang. Important measures include always anticipating the possibility of hostilities by consciously planning to employ the normal means of production for warfare49; feigning and dissembling to deceive the enemy and allay suspicions; using bribes, gifts, and other methods to induce disloyalty among enemy officials and to cause chaos and consternation in their ranks; and further increasing the enemy's profligacy and debilitation by furnishing the tools for self-destruction-such as music, wine, women, and fascinating rarities (jade carvings and the like). Complete secrecy is mandated, and when the battle is joined, constraints should not be imposed."

  Military Affairs

  Much of the book is devoted to detailed tactics for particular situations. However, the T'ai Kung also gave advice on many topics, including campaign strategy, the selection of generals and officers, training, preparation and types of weapons, creation of new weapons, communications, battle tactics, and organization. Many of his observations and strategies are obsolete, but others have enduring value. Articulation, segmentation and control, independent action, and specialized weapons systems and their forces are discussed extensively. The following particularly merit summary introduction.

  The General The general must be carefully selected and should be properly invested in his role as commander-in-chief with a formal ceremony at the state altars, after which he is entrusted with absolute authority over all military matters. Once he has assumed command, the ruler cannot interfere with the general's actions or decisions, primarily because valuable opportunities might be lost or actions forced that endanger the army, but also to prevent any officers from questioning the general's authority by presuming on their familiarity with the kings'

  Generals and commanders should embody critical characteristics in balanced combinations to qualify them for leadership and be free of traits that might either lead to judgmental errors or be exploitable and thereby doom their forces. Several chapters enumerate these essential aspects of character and their correlated flaws and suggest psychological techniques for evaluating and selecting military leaders.52

  Organization and Unity Both the military and civilian spheres must be marked by unity and thorough integration if they are to be effective. Individual sections must be assigned single tasks, and an integrated system of reporting and responsibility should be implemented. A command hierarchy must be created and imposed, with a full staff of general officers and technical and administrative specialists.53

  Battle Tactics The T'ai Kung analyzes numerous battle situations and formulates some general principles to guide the commander's actions and his efforts to determine appropriate tactics based on objective classifications of terrain, aspects of the enemy, and relative strength of the confrontational forces.54 There are two basic categories: one in which the army is about to engage an enemy, and one in which it suddenly finds itself at a disadvantage in a forced encounter. The topics covered include selection of advantageous terrain, assault methods against fortifications,55 night attacks, counterattacks, escape from entrapment, forest warfare, water conflict, mountain fighting, valley defense, survival under fire attack, situations and topography to avoid, techniques for psychological warfare, probing and manipulating the enemy, ways to induce fear, and methods for deception.

  Despite the passage of millennia, certain prominent principles, strategies, and tactics from the Six Secret Teachings retain validity and continue to be employed in both the military and business spheres. Clearly, the most important of these are deception and surprise.56 To maximize an attack's effectiveness, unorthodox measures should be implemented to manipulate the enemy psychologically and physically. Several techniques are possible, but among the most effective are false attacks, feints, and limited encounters designed to constantly harry deployed forces. Following these the main attack can be launched, taking advantage of the enemy's surprise and its expectation that the attack is merely another ruse.

  Additional tactics include inciting confusion in the enemy's ranks, through such tactics as disinformation, then taking advantage of the ensuing chaos; overawing the enemy through massive displays of force; being aggressive and never yielding the initiative; stressing speed and swiftness; availing oneself of climatic and terrain conditions that trouble and annoy the enemy, such as rain and wind; attacking from out of the sun or at sunset; and mounting intensive efforts to gather intelligence. The enemy must be evaluated and judgments properly rendered before a decision to attack or defend can be made. Weaknesses in the opposing general should be fully exploited, and assaults should be directed toward the enemy's undefended positions. Traps and ambushes need to be avoided but should always be deployed when in difficulty. Forces should normally be consolidated for effective concentration of power rather than dispersed and weakened. Those who surrender should be spared to encourage the enemy to abandon its resistance. The troops should be mobile, and their specializations should be fully utilized. No general should ever suffer a defeat from lack of training or preparation.

  Date and Authorship of the Text

  The historic T'ai Kung's relationship to the Six Secret Teachings remains somewhat controversial and is marked by widely differing opinions. The present Chinese title, Tai Kung Liu-t'ao, first appeared in the "Treatise on Literature" incorporated into the Sui shu-the history of the short-lived Sui dynasty written in the T'ang era. Prior to this, both Liu Pei and the great general Chu-ko Liang are noted by a San-kuo chih commentator as having high regard for a book entitled Liu-t'ao.57 Yen Shih-ku, the famous exegete (perhaps erroneously) identified this work with another, similarly titled book extan
t in the Han dynasty that was thought to be a Chou dynasty historical work.58

  The meaning of the title is not completely clear; however, the first character, liu, incontrovertibly means "six." The second character, t'ao, has the primary meaning of a "wrap," or "cover"; within a military context it meant the cloth wrapped around a bow or perhaps a bowcase used to carry it.59 By extension it means "to conceal" or "to secret," and by implication it probably came to refer to the skills involved in using a bow in warfare and thus in military arts in general.60 Thus, the Liu-t'ao should be understood as a book containing six categorical discussions about the skills and tactics of warfare. The title has occasionally been translated as the Six Cases. However, we have opted to emphasize the aspect of wrapping things and thereby keeping them secret together with the putative author's role in teaching and advising and have chosen the title Secret Teachings.

  Members of the Confucian school, including a number of prominent Sung dynasty scholars, disparaged the Six Secret Teachings as a forgery of the Warring States period, during which the other military writings were devel- oped.61 Thereafter, other pedants attributed it to the T'ang dynasty, vociferously denying it any claim to antiquity. Their main criticism focused on the realistic nature of the work and the "despicable policies" the T'ai Kung clearly advocates. As mentioned in the preceding discussion of the T'ai Kung's historicity, they dogmatically insisted that true Sages, such as the founders of the Chou dynasty and the T'ai Kung, would not debase themselves or be compelled to use artifice, deception, sex, and bribes to achieve their ends. Therefore, from their narrow perspective, the conquest of the Shang can only be understood as the victory of culture and Virtue over barbarism and perversity.62 Unfortunately, these pedants have systematically ignored the ancient emphasis on both the civil and the martial and thereby overlooked the decisive nature of the final battle and the conditions preceding it wherein after an extensive forced march, the vastly outnumbered Chou army decimated the Shang forces. (A few professional soldiers have contradicted the pedants, emphasizing that the realistic character of the Chou's military activities and their total commitment to employing every means possible to vanquish the evil and preserve the populace should be construed as a clear and certain attestation to the validity of the text.)

  Some traditionalists, especially historians with career military service backgrounds, are apparently anxious to uphold the authenticity of the work and still claim that it dates from the founding of the Chou dynasty.63 Others with more moderate viewpoints believe the core teachings could have been preserved in terse form on bamboo and been transmitted orally by the T'ai Kung's descendants in the state of Ch'i, becoming the foundation for Ch'i military studies. They acknowledge that over the centuries the original discussions probably suffered numerous accretions and losses, as is the case with Chuang-tzu and Han Fei-tzu, which were finally compiled and revised late in the Warring States period.64

  The confident assertions that the entire work is a T'ang forgery were dramatically destroyed with the discovery of a virtually identical, although only partial, bamboo slip edition in a Han dynasty tomb in the early 1970s.65 Combined with other Han historical references, this finding proves that portions of the text assumed their present form by at least the early Han era and has been cited by proponents of the T'ai Kung's essential connection with the book as evidence for their position. However, even those advocates who staunchly believe a prototype text underlies the current Six Secret Teachings are compelled to acknowledge several historical anachronisms. The lan guage and style of writing indicate extensive revisions, and the final commitment to written form could not have occurred before perhaps the fourth century B.C.66 The frequent mention of advanced weapons, such as the crossbow and sword,67 and entire chapters devoted to cavalry tactics prove that the penultimate author lived seven to eight hundred years later than the T'ai Kung. For example, Chapter 55, "Equivalent Forces," discusses the relative effectiveness of chariots, cavalrymen, and infantrymen even though the infantry did not become significant for centuries and the cavalry only emerged in the third century B.C.

  Several scholars have asserted that the Six Secret Teachings extensively quotes passages and borrows concepts from the other military classics, such as Sun-tzu's Art of War.68 However, questions of priority must always be considered subjects for debate. The Art of War may in fact be terse and abstract because Sun-tzu benefited from this tradition of military thought and, as with the authors of such other works as the Wei Liao-tzu, availed himself of concepts from the embryonic text of the Six Secret Teachings and assiduously assimilated common sayings.69 In the Warring States period, thorough familiarity with all extant military thought would have been essential if states and commanders were to survive. Therefore, the absence of both conceptual and textual borrowing would probably be more remarkable than the presence thereof because it would indicate highly segmented and strictly preserved schools of tactics and secret strategy.

  One final viewpoint regarding the text's transmission holds that the famous military writing given to Chang Liang in the turbulent years preceding the Han dynasty's founding was the Six Secret Teachings rather than the Three Strategies of Huang Shih-kung.70 This book would be particularly appropriate because of its historical echoes: Its readers were committed to the populist overthrow of another brutal, oppressive ruling house-the Ch'in. Accordingly, it has been suggested that the book was actually composed by a military expert in the third century B.C. when the Ch'in were relentlessly destroying their enemies and consolidating their power.71 This would explain the mature development of concepts and strategies, the extensive knowledge of weapons and defensive equipment, the emphasis on benevolent government, and the efforts to preserve the book's secrecy.

  The Six T'ao

  Most commentators characterize the first two Secret Teachings as focusing on grand strategy and planning for war and the last four as falling within the category of tactical studies.72 However, because either the original authors of the Six Secret Teachings failed to provide any explanations for their apparently thematic groupings or such prefatory material has been lost, it is difficult to perceive any intrinsic connection between titles such as "dragon" and the contents of the section. Only the first two Secret Teachings, the Civil and the Martial, which focus on the two foundations for conducting warfarean economically sound, well-administered state with a motivated populace, and a strong army-have contents that justify their titles. Although a few attempts have been made to discern thematic issues underlying the six individual classifications, such distinctions often appear inadequate to support assigning a particular chapter to one Teaching or another without knowledge of the extant work.

  Although the Table of Contents for this section provides a general indication of each Teaching's topics and the translator's introduction surveys the main subjects in some detail, a brief characterization of the individual Teachings may still be useful.

  Civil T'ao

  Moral, effective government is the basis for survival and the foundation for warfare. The state must thrive economically while limiting expenditures, foster appropriate values and behavior among the populace, implement rewards and punishments, employ the worthy, and refrain from disturbing or harming the people.73

  Martial T'ao

  The Martial Secret Teaching continues the Civil T'ao's discussion of political, rather than military, measures. It begins with the T'ai Kung's analysis of the contemporary political world and his assessment of the Chou's prospects for successfully revolting against the Shang if their avowed objective is to save the world from tyranny and suffering. Attracting the disaffected weakens the enemy and strengthens the state; employing subterfuge and psychological techniques allows manipulation of the enemy and hastens its demise. The ruler must visibly cultivate his Virtue and embrace government policies that will allow the state to compete for the minds and hearts of the people; the state will thus gain victory without engaging in battle.74

  Dragon T'ao

  The Drag
on Secret Teaching focuses primarily on military organization, including the specialized responsibilities of the command staff, the characteristics and qualifications of generals and methods for their evaluation and selection, the ceremony appropriate for commissioning a commanding general to ensure that his independence and awesomeness are established, the importance of rewards and punishments in creating and maintaining the general's awesomeness and authority, and essential behavior if the general is to truly command in person and foster allegiance and unity in his troops. Secondary issues concern military communications and the paramount need for secrecy; evaluation of the situation and how to act decisively when the moment arrives; an understanding of basic tactical principles, including flexibility and the unorthodox, and avoiding the common errors of command; various cues for fathoming the enemy's situation; and the everyday basis for military skills and equipment.

  Tiger Tao

  The Tiger Secret Teaching opens with a discussion of the important categories of military equipment and weapons, then continues with widely ranging expositions on tactical principles and essential issues of command. Although types of deployment are considered briefly, and the necessary preparation of amphibious equipment is addressed, most of the chapters provide tactics for extricating oneself from adverse battlefield situations. The solutions generally emphasize speed, maneuverability, unified action, decisive commitment, the employment of misdirection, the establishment of ambushes, and the appropriate use of different types of forces.

  Leopard T'ao

  The Leopard Secret Teaching emphasizes tactical solutions for particularly difficult types of terrain, such as forests, mountains, ravines and defiles, lakes and rivers, deep valleys, and other constricted locations. It also contains discussions of methods to contain rampaging invaders, confront superior forces, deploy effectively, and act explosively.