The Art of War

Summary

There are many versions of this work in English, and it is included as a useful reflection once one has pondered Daoism’s key texts. The title is properly ‘'Sun Tzu's Military Method'. It was written at the time of the Dao and Zhuang Zi, several centuries before the Lieh Tzu. For fifteen hundred years, it was part of China’s canonical strategic anthology, which became known as the Seven Military Classics.

In modern Anglophone culture it is often the only strategic text someone has read, supplanting and exceeding the previous dominant strategic text (von Clausewitz’s On War, 1832, tr. 1874). Leaders from Mao Zedong and Takeda Shingen to Võ Nguyên Giáp and Norman Schwarzkopf Jr. have explicitly acknowledged the book’s influence on them. 

This translation is notably the second major version of it in English. It follows a translation by Everard Ferguson Calthrop that Giles found deeply contemptible, as one can see from the introduction. 

It is important to note that most scholars do not consider the Art of War one of the classic Daoist texts. While it is a product and application of the philosophy, it is more of an exegetical monograph than a consideration of the philosophical underpinnings of Daoism. 

Much like the Zhuang Zi, it takes the core ideas and realizes them in specific practical situations. It does so with such certainty that many contest it as a ‘true’ Daoist work. As you will see from the discussions embedded elsewhere, the key Daoist texts value contradiction and paradox far too much to be as procedurally simple as the Art of War is.

It is not clear that this criticism is fair, however. A much kinder perspective is that Daoism’s great failure is in its apparent lack of any utilitarian or social value. While Confucianism provides a balance, Sun Tzu’s work attempts to build a more practical version of Daoism than the key texts allow for.