by Sunzi
5. In attacking with fire, one should be prepared to meet five possible developments:
6. (1) When fire breaks out inside the enemy’s camp, respond at once with an attack from without.
7. (2) If there is an outbreak of fire, but the enemy’s soldiers remain quiet, bide your time and do not attack.
8. (3) When the force of the flames has reached its height, follow it up with an attack, if that is practicable; if not, stay where you are.
9. (4) If it is possible to make an assault with fire from without, do not wait for it to break out within, but deliver your attack at a favourable moment.
10. (5) When you start a fire, be to windward of it. Do not attack from the leeward.
11. A wind that rises in the daytime lasts long, but a night breeze soon falls.
12. In every army, the five developments connected with fire must be known, the movements of the stars calculated, and a watch kept for the proper days.
13. Hence those who use fire as an aid to the attack show intelligence; those who use water as an aid to the attack gain an accession of strength.
14. By means of water, an enemy may be intercepted, but not robbed of all his belongings.
15. Unhappy is the fate of one who tries to win his battles and succeed in his attacks without cultivating the spirit of enterprise; for the result is waste of time and general stagnation.
16. Hence the saying: The enlightened ruler lays his plans well ahead; the good general cultivates his resources.
17. Move not unless you see an advantage; use not your troops unless there is something to be gained; fight not unless the position is critical.
18. No ruler should put troops into the field merely to gratify his own spleen; no general should fight a battle simply out of pique.
19. If it is to your advantage, make a forward move; if not, stay where you are.
20. Anger may in time change to gladness; vexation may be succeeded by content.
21. But a kingdom that has once been destroyed can never come again into being; nor can the dead ever be brought back to life.
22. Hence the enlightened ruler is heedful, and the good general full of caution. This is the way to keep a country at peace and an army intact.
XIII. THE USE OF SPIES
1. Sun Tzu said: Raising a host of a hundred thousand men and marching them great distances entails heavy loss on the people and a drain on the resources of the State. The daily expenditure will amount to a thousand ounces of silver. There will be commotion at home and abroad, and men will drop down exhausted on the highways. As many as seven hundred thousand families will be impeded in their labour.
2. Hostile armies may face each other for years, striving for the victory which is decided in a single day. This being so, to remain in ignorance of the enemy’s condition simply because one grudges the outlay of a hundred ounces of silver in honours and emoluments is the height of inhumanity.
3. One who acts thus is no leader of men, no present help to his sovereign, no master of victory.
4. Thus, what enables the wise sovereign and the good general to strike and conquer, and achieve things beyond the reach of ordinary men, is foreknowledge.
5. Now this foreknowledge cannot be elicited from spirits; it cannot be obtained inductively from experience, nor by any deductive calculation.
6. Knowledge of the enemy’s dispositions can only be obtained from other men.
7. Hence the use of spies, of whom there are five classes: (1) Local spies; (2) inward spies; (3) converted spies; (4) doomed spies; (5) surviving spies.
8. When these five kinds of spy are all at work, none can discover the secret system. This is called “divine manipulation of the threads.” It is the sovereign’s most precious faculty.
9. Having local spies means employing the services of the inhabitants of a district.
10. Having inward spies, making use of officials of the enemy.
11. Having converted spies, getting hold of the enemy’s spies and using them for our own purposes.
12. Having doomed spies, doing certain things openly for purposes of deception, and allowing our own spies to know of them and report them to the enemy.
13. Surviving spies, finally, are those who bring back news from the enemy’s camp.
14. Hence it is that with none in the whole army are more intimate relations to be maintained than with spies. None should be more liberally rewarded. In no other business should greater secrecy be preserved.
15. Spies cannot be usefully employed without a certain intuitive sagacity.
16. They cannot be properly managed without benevolence and straightforwardness.
17. Without subtle ingenuity of mind, one cannot make certain of the truth of their reports.
18. Be subtle! Be subtle! and use your spies for every kind of business.
19. If a secret piece of news is divulged by a spy before the time is ripe, he must be put to death together with the man to whom the secret was told.
20. Whether the object be to crush an army, to storm a city, or to assassinate an individual, it is always necessary to begin by finding out the names of the attendants, the aides-de-camp, the door-keepers and sentries of the general in command. Our spies must be commissioned to ascertain these.
21. The enemy’s spies who have come to spy on us must be sought out, tempted with bribes, led away and comfortably housed. Thus they will become converted spies and available for our service.
22. It is through the information brought by the converted spy that we are able to acquire and employ local and inward spies.
23. It is owing to his information, again, that we can cause the doomed spy to carry false tidings to the enemy.
24. Lastly, it is by his information that the surviving spy can be used on appointed occasions.
25. The end and aim of spying in all its five varieties is knowledge of the enemy; and this knowledge can only be derived, in the first instance, from the converted spy. Hence it is essential that the converted spy be treated with the utmost liberality.
26. Of old, the rise of the Yin dynasty was due to I Chih, who had served under the Hsia. Likewise, the rise of the Chou dynasty was due to Lü Ya, who had served under the Yin.
27. Hence it is only the enlightened ruler and the wise general who will use the highest intelligence of the army for purposes of spying, and thereby they achieve great results. Spies are a most important element in war, because on them depends an army’s ability to move.
THE ART OF WAR
with Notes, Commentaries from the
Chinese Masters, and an Appendix by
Lionel Giles and Dallas Galvin
ON THE TRANSLATION, NOTES, AND COMMENTARIES
by Dallas Galvin
LIONEL GILES WANTED TO ALLOW his readers to understand the text of The Art of War as Sun Tzu intended it. To achieve his ambition would require three tasks: creating a text able to stand alone as a work in English; indicating where the original text was uncertain; and providing English readers with some measure of the commentary—the history lessons, the strategic debates, the thoughtful qualifications—that the typical Chinese student would receive. Thus along with his translation of The Art of War, Giles provided copious critical notes. We have reproduced them, with emendations, along with the text as Giles originally conceived it. In addition, Giles presented commentary from some of the most important thinkers on military and historical matters throughout Chinese history.
Giles understood he was blazing a trail. At the time of the French Revolution, China had been the world’s largest empire. In 1910 England held the title and was feeling the responsibility. This was the moment of high British Empire—a decade after the Boxer Rebellion, fifty years after the Indian Mutiny, and eight since the bitterly fought Boer War—when imperial reach was consolidating in Asia and Africa. Nevertheless, as an English speaker Giles was flying solo. Ever since the Enlightenment, the French and the Jesuits had made strides in translating Chinese arts and letters for th
e West. The Germans, the Russians, and particularly the Japanese had begun to study and translate the great Chinese classics. In this realm, however, the English were just gearing up for what would become a golden century of Asian language scholarship.
In 1905 Captain E. F. Calthrop, R.F.A., had published an English translation of The Art of War in Tokyo, under the Japanese name for Sun Tzu: Sonshi. Assisted by two Japanese military men, he had worked from a Japanese version of the text. Giles dismissed Calthrop’s work as substandard and not scholarly, and other scholars have rejected it too. At the turn of the nineteenth century, Calthrop’s work did not face quite the scholarly depredation that it would by the 1930s, but it was clearly unacceptable.
Giles’s effort in 1910 was the first translation into English of Sun Tzu’s The Art of War by a serious sinologist. With a text some 2,400 years old, Giles confronted a language and a sensibility at considerable remove from his own, and he worked years before the great “Orientalists”—Arthur Waley, Ivan Morris, Donald Keene, Burton Watson, James Legge, John Fairbank, Owen Lattimore, and scores of poet-translators—would fairly invent Asian studies for English speakers. Yet Giles achieved his mission. His version can and does stand alone. It is still studied by military men and is beloved by general readers who have no connection to combat.
For more than fifty years, the Giles translation was the definitive edition—it had no competitors. But at the opening of the twentieth century his feat was neither easy nor assured. A quick scan of the original Chinese text frames the issues: The writing is neat and brief—like a haiku poem. And in several instances, it makes no earthly sense in English or Chinese. We need not investigate too deeply to discover why. When we encounter works like The Art of War we are on the long cusp of an oral tradition. As Arthur Waley writes, “The earliest use of connected writing … was as an aid to memory … [I]ts purpose was to help people not to forget what they knew already, whereas, in more advanced communities, the chief use of writing is to tell people things they have not heard before” (introduction to The Book of Songs, p. 11).
A completely accurate translation is categorically impossible, always a hopeful approximation. But translators working in European tongues rarely confront the Pandora’s box Giles did. He succeeds, but not without infelicities and compromises. Guiding his readers into this fabulous, ancient world, he introduces English words to descant the laconic Chinese text—sparingly, but he does. Later translators will argue against this practice, but they will have access to a version of the text that is “purer” by a thousand years. And other translators will reflect the reigning literary and cultural trends of their times. That is the “way” of translation—Dryden and Pope, even Fitzgerald set the standard for their periods, but now they sound, if not quaint, more like themselves than a true rendering of other men’s words. Language is a living thing, and as change is essential to life, it is characteristic of our words. We read Dryden’s translations of Homer, Ovid, or Virgil for the devilish brilliance of Dryden’s own lyricism, and even his vocabulary seems odd now, a thing apart. In The Art of War Giles found some measure of himself—citizen, thinker, pioneer, and, most especially, educator. That’s probably why this work still stands.
Lionel Giles had to carve a passageway between West and East, Classical and contemporary, yet still keep to the text Sun Tzu composed. In the notes, Giles nails cultural and historical observations, plus the interpretations of the commentators, to the relevant phrases he translates. It is often delightful reading, but cumbersome. He wonders aloud about his choices and argues with the interpretations of other scholars, while offering wise observations about the world and its bellicose propensities. The notes break the rhythms of the original, herding the text as a sheepdog might into fields of military history, corrals of interpretive queries.
The notes are of uneven length, naturally, and do not accompany every item. We have maintained the style of the original notes but have edited them for relevance; for example, they include descriptions of Giles’s methods and rationales for the translation, but such academic discussion is of interest only to linguistic scholars, and we have eliminated it here. When, for this edition, we have selected only part of a note, we have not used ellipses to show that, in the original, text precedes or follows the selection, but we have used ellipses to show omitted words within the selection.
Mere words can bridge only part of the epochal cultural chasm that exists between Sun Tzu’s time and subsequent eras, even for the Chinese. Giles also faced textual interpolations and corruptions that had accreted like barnacles to the original over the millennia. For centuries, the best scholars in China had chewed over certain ideograms, argued over entire lines (or their absence), and fought over the veracity of variants of the original, just as Western scholars debate the authorship of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey and the provenance of Shakespeare’s plays. Over the centuries, a great scholarly literature developed to explicate the thorny passages, to wonder over the ideograms, and to ferret out bogus additions.
Giles provides us with the most pungent and trenchant of them here in selections from the commentaries. What a gift! The authors include Wang Hsi, Ts’ao Ts’ao, Tu Yu and his grandson Tu Mu, Li Ch’üan, Mêng Shih—some of the most illustrious names in Chinese military and historical literature. They elucidate the numbered points Sun Tzu makes with examples from China’s 3,000-year history, in a method that is a classic Chinese teaching device and characteristic of Chinese expository style. Apart from the delicious entrée they give us to Chinese culture, the commentaries present a print approximation for the modern reader of how an instructive treatise might have been transmitted at the time of Sun Tzu. As part of his original introduction Giles included descriptions of the major Chinese commentators he cites in the notes; they appear in this edition in the Appendix.
In this edition, we have introduced relevant excerpts from the work of Western writers and thinkers, ancient and modern—generals, poets, political leaders, and other observers.
Sun Tzu on The Art of War
I. LAYING PLANS
[When the enemy launched a surprise attack on Caesar’s supply train] Caesar had everything to do at one time: to raise the standard … ; to sound the trumpet; to recall the soldiers from the fortifications; to summon those who had proceeded some distance to seek materials for a rampart; to form a battle line; to encourage the men; and to give the signal. A great part of these arrangements was prevented by the shortness of time and the sudden approach and charge of the enemy. Under these difficulties, two things proved of advantage: the soldiers’ skill and experience … and the fact that Caesar had forbidden his several lieutenants to depart from their respective legions before the camp was fortified.
Julius Caesar, De Bello Gallico (58-51 B.C.)
Sun Tzu signals the importance he assigns to planning by opening The Art of War with its discussion—and then reiterating many of the points from this chapter through subsequent chapters. While we cannot know with certainty whether the Greeks and the Romans studied Sun Tzu’s work, they must have known it at least indirectly. Across the centuries caravansaries plied the Silk Road, exchanging cultural tidbits far less valuable between China and empires to the West. DG
1. Sun Tzu said: The art of war is of vital importance to the State.
2. It is a matter of life and death, a road either to safety or to ruin. Hence it is a subject of inquiry which can on no account be neglected.
3. The art of war, then, is governed by five constant factors, to be taken into account in one’s deliberations, when seeking to determine the conditions obtaining in the field.
4. These are: (1) The Moral Law; (2) Heaven; (3) Earth; (4) The Commander; (5) Method and discipline.
It appears from what follows that Sun Tzu means by Moral Law a principle of harmony, not unlike the Tao [method or way] of Lao Tzu in its moral aspect. One might be tempted to render it by “morale,” were it not considered as an attribute of the ruler in paragraph 13.
We have
here the fundamental problem of ethics, the crux of the theory of moral conduct. What is justice?—shall we seek righteousness, or shall we seek power?—is it better to be good, or to be strong?
Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy (1926)
5, 6. The Moral Law causes the people to be in complete accord with their ruler, so that they will follow him regardless of their lives, undismayed by any danger.
If, for example, good meant intelligent, and virtue meant wisdom; if men could be taught to see clearly their real interests, to see afar the distant results of their deeds, to criticize and coördinate their desires out of a self-canceling chaos into a purposive and creative harmony—this, perhaps, would provide for the educated and sophisticated man the morality which in the unlettered relies on reiterated precepts and external control.
Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy (1926)
7. Heaven signifies night and day, cold and heat, times and seasons.
Wang Hsi [see “Appendix: The Commentators”] … may be right in saying that what is meant is “the general economy of Heaven,” including the five elements, the four seasons, wind and clouds, and other phenomena.
Though from the earliest times the Chinese were monotheistic, by Sun Tzu’s era various lesser deities associated with the seasons and the elements had taken hold. DG
8. Earth comprises distances, great and small; danger and security; open ground and narrow passes; the chances of life and death.
For Sun Tzu, heaven and earth conjure the conditions and the situations, as much as the physical terrain, whereby moral law is made manifest and played out. DG
9. The Commander stands for the virtues of wisdom, sincerity, benevolence, courage and strictness.
The five cardinal virtues of the Chinese are (1) humanity or benevolence; (2) uprightness of mind; (3) self-respect, self-control, or “proper feeling”; (4) wisdom; (5) sincerity or good faith. Here wisdom and sincerity are put before humanity, and the two military virtues of “courage” and “strictness” [are] substituted for uprightness and self-respect.
