Art of War (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) Read Free

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.”
    Every commentator, however, will point out that for all the wonders of its cities, the heart of Chinese society is in the countryside. The power of the landowners over the peasants as well as the land during the time when Sun Tzu wrote is difficult to imagine for those who have experienced the rootlessness of contemporary society. The aristocracy not only controlled the land much as feudal lords would some 1,000 years later in Europe, but they owned the carts, the livestock, the implements, and even the people. As Roberts points out, adding an important dimension to Sun Tzu’s advice to generals in encouraging troops: “Labourers could be sold, exchanged, or left by will”; in other words, many members of the infantry would have been serfs. Also, in those times the nobleman always had a monopoly on armaments, and “only noblemen could afford the weapons, armour, and horses [of war].”
    Highly developed as Chinese culture was, the era of the Spring and Autumn period, during which Sun Tzu composed his treatise, was outstandingly brutal. More than one hundred feudal states and principalities were reduced to about forty, in a process that continued until about 403 B.C., when the state of Ch’in officially split into three parts and there were only seven important states left. The year began the Warring States period, which ended in the unification of the empire under Ch’in Shih-huang-ti, the first emperor of the Ch’in Dynasty, who took power in 221 B.C.
    Classical Chinese at the time Sun Tzu wrote was a matter of “pronouncements,” as was also true in early Western and Near Eastern civilizations; consider, for example, the pithy maxims of Marcus Aurelius and Hesiod. And particularly in the case of documents such as Sun Tzu’s military treatise, clans and families in a sense “owned” information—just as in medieval European guilds fathers passed on their goldsmithing or other specialized training and lore to their sons; the transmission of this information was accomplished in both physical and verbal lessons. A written version would have served solely as a mnemonic, and the language was therefore often startling and symbolic, like poetry.
    Further, both as an aid to memory and also because of the intrinsic characteristics of the language, which consists of single syllables ending in mutable vowel sounds, there is a tendency in Chinese writing “to use balanced, parallel phrases, and to treat ideas in the form of numerical categories—the five felicities, the three virtues, etc.” ( Early Chinese Literature ). This gives the language an unparalleled drive and power but, as with poetry, makes it almost impossible to translate while retaining its original efficiency and style. And in a strong divergence from the Western Romantic ideal, the Chinese made no distinction between belles lettres and didactic literature, between philosophy, say, and storytelling or military treatises. The Emperor Wan of Wei even referred to literature as “a vital force in the ordering of the state.”
    The distinguishing mark of writing was its refinement or its vulgarity of expression. “Good” meant works of whatever stripe that were “morally sound in content, clear in thought, and expressed in suitably gracious and dignified language” ( Early