Lably
Skip to content

The Art of War

5th-century BC Chinese military treatise

  • 10 min read
  • 4 chapters
A Chinese bamboo book, open and unfolded to display the contents. This copy of The Art of War (on the cover, "孫子兵法") by Sun Tzu is part of a collection at the University of California, Riverside . The
vlasta2, bluefootedbooby on flickr.com · CC BY 2.0

Related on Lably

Through Skill

LabThe Pattern ParadeLabFruit & Sabzi CartLabWho Lives Where?LabRangoli Rule-Maker

The treatise comprises a detailed explanation and analysis of the 5th-century BCE Chinese military, from weapons, environmental conditions, financial logistics and strategy to morale, rank and discipline. Sun portrays war as a costly, destructive last resort; prolonged warfare erodes the state faster than the enemy ever could. Sun uses diplomacy and economic principles in explaining how to keep war brief, contained, controlled, and as cheap as possible by minimizing financial exposure. Sun also stresses the importance of intelligence operatives and espionage to both the war effort and the prevention of war. Considered one of history's finest military tacticians and analysts, his teachings and strategies formed the basis of advanced military training throughout the world.

The text was first translated into a European language in 1772, when the French Jesuit priest Jean Joseph Marie Amiot produced a French version. The first annotated English translation was published in 1910 by the British scholar Lionel Giles. Military and political leaders such as the Chinese communist revolutionary Mao Zedong, Japanese daimyō Takeda Shingen, Vietnamese general Võ Nguyên Giáp, and American generals Douglas MacArthur and Norman Schwarzkopf Jr. are all cited as having drawn inspiration from the book.

History

Text and commentaries

The Art of War is traditionally attributed to an ancient Chinese military general known as Sun Tzu (pinyin: Sūnzǐ), meaning 'Master Sun'. Sun Tzu is said to have lived in the 6th century BCE, but the earliest parts of The Art of War probably date to at least 100 years later.

Sima Qian's Shiji, the first of China's Twenty-Four Histories, records an early Chinese tradition that a text on military matters was written by one Sun Wu (孫武) from the state of Qi, and that this text had been read and studied by King Helü of Wu (r. 514–495 BCE). This text was traditionally identified with the received Master Sun's Art of War. The conventional view was that Sun Wu was a military theorist from the end of the Spring and Autumn period (776–471 BCE) who fled Qi to the southeastern state of Wu, where he is said to have impressed the king with his ability to quickly train officials, including court women, in military discipline—and to have made Wu's armies powerful enough to challenge the rival state of Chu to Wu's west. This view is still widely held in China.

The strategist and warlord Kai Wen in the early 3rd century AD authored the earliest known commentary on the Art of War. Kai's preface makes clear that he edited the text and removed certain passages, but the extent of his changes were unclear historically. The Art of War appears throughout the bibliographical catalogs of the Chinese dynastic histories, but listings of its divisions and size varied widely.

Authorship

Beginning around the 12th century, Chinese scholars began to question Sun Tzu's historical existence. Their primary ground was that the historical classic Zuo Zhuan, which mentions most of the notable figures from the Spring and Autumn period, does not mention Sun Tzu at all. The name "Sun Wu" (孫武) does not appear in any text prior to the Records of the Grand Historian. Some scholars have suspected it is a made-up descriptive cognomen meaning "the fugitive warrior", glossing the surname "Sun" as the related term "fugitive" (xùn 遜), while "Wu" (wǔ 武) is (1) the ancient Chinese virtue of "martial, valiant" and (2) a Jianghuai dialectal synonym of 士; shì "knight", which corresponds to Sunzi's role as the hero's doppelgänger in the story of Wu Zixu. In the early 20th century, the Chinese writer and reformer Liang Qichao theorized that the text was actually written in the 4th century BC by Sun Tzu's purported descendant Sun Bin, as several historical sources mention a military treatise he wrote. It is possible, according to Samuel B. Griffith that Sun Wu may not have written The Art of War.

In 1972, the Yinqueshan Han slips were discovered in two Han dynasty (206 BC – 220 AD) tombs near the city of Linyi in Shandong. Among the many bamboo slip writings contained in the tombs, which had been sealed between 134 and 118 BCE, were two separate texts: one attributed to "Sun Tzu", corresponding to the received text, and another attributed to Sun Bin, which explains and expands upon the earlier The Art of War by Sunzi. The Sun Bin text's material overlaps with much of the "Sun Tzu" text. The two may be "a single, continuously developing intellectual tradition united under the Sun name". This discovery showed that much of the historical confusion was due to the fact that there were two texts that could have been referred to as "Master Sun's Art of War", not one. The content of the earlier text is about one-third of the chapters of the modern The Art of War, and their text matches very closely. It is now generally accepted that the earlier The Art of War was completed sometime between 500 and 430 BCE.

Sign in to keep reading

3 more chapters are free with a Lably account.

More in Literature

MahabharataAncient smṛti text and Sanskrit epicOxford English DictionaryHistorical dictionary of the English languageScience fictionLiterary genreIliadEpic poem attributed to HomerLiteratureWritten work of artPoetryForm of literature