The Art of War

Introduction

The Art of War — in Chinese Sunzi bingfa, "Master Sun's Methods of War" — is a short book of thirteen chapters, little more than six thousand characters long, and the most celebrated work on strategy ever written. It was composed in China's age of rival states, when war had become a permanent condition and the survival of a state could hang on a single campaign. Its author, by tradition, was Sun Wu, a general in the service of the king of Wu at the end of the sixth century BC.

What makes the book remarkable is how little it glorifies battle. It opens by declaring war "a great matter of the state, the ground of life and death", to be entered only after sober calculation in the ancestral temple. It counts the ruinous cost of long campaigns, and it names as the highest achievement not victory in battle but victory without battle: "to subdue the enemy's army without fighting is the height of excellence." Its methods are those of the mind — foresight, information, deception, timing, and the shaping of circumstances so that the outcome is decided before the armies meet.

Several of its ideas have entered the common stock of human thought: know the enemy and know yourself; all warfare is based on deception; be swift as the wind and immovable as the mountain; an army, like water, takes its form from the ground it flows over. Its chapters on terrain, on the "momentum" of circumstances, on the interplay of the regular and the extraordinary, and on the use of spies are still studied in military academies, and its principles are applied in fields as far apart as diplomacy, business and sport.

Through the centuries the book was copied, commented on and studied by generals and statesmen across East Asia. A Jesuit missionary brought it to Europe in a French version in 1772, and since then it has been translated into every major language.

This translation follows the received text of the thirteen chapters. The traditional chapter titles are kept, and brief notes explain names and allusions that a reader today would otherwise need a commentary to follow.