Series on the History of Chinese Philosophy, Pt. 21
Ministers of Military Methods — From Sunzi’s Art of War to the Thirty-six Stratagems
The Bing Fa Tradition
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Welcome to Part 21 of the series! The previous parts are here:
Now that we’ve seen how “ministers of methods” operated in the throne room (Part 20), let’s take a look at how they fared on the battlefield.
The Bingfa, or “Military Methods” tradition hasn’t enjoyed quite the same philosophical scrutiny in the west as the more “academic” schools of thought… mainly being studied by military and business leaders. As Andrew Meyer has stated:
“In the study of Warring States sources, the treatment of “military texts” (bing shu 兵書) has been parochial by comparison with that of other types of sources. That is to say, where other Warring States sources are frequently juxtaposed with one another for intertextual analysis, the military texts are rarely mined for insights into the interpretation of non-military writings, or enlisted as evidence for research questions not pertaining narrowly to military affairs.” — Asia Major, Volume 30, part 1, 2017: 1–24.
Why is this so? Do the military texts deserve to be treated the same as sources from traditions like Confucianism or Daoism?
Is there something more broadly philosophical to be found in the bingfa sources?
A growing number of scholars would now answer in the affirmative.
Sunzi’s “Art of War”
Sunzi bingfa [孫子兵法], which literally means “Master Sun’s Military Methods” is the book that’s now known as “The Art of War” to western audiences. Tradition states it was authored by an expert in military tactics — named Sun Wu — who hailed from the state of Qi and thrived during the late Spring and Autumn period (ca. 500 BCE).
According to a legend, which THANKFULLY most scholars agree is apocryphal, king Helü of Wu invited Sunzi to court to demonstrate his military prowess before hiring him to lead the Wu forces into battle.
Sunzi had claimed he could turn any group of soldiers into an elite fighting force, so the king challenged him to train his palace concubines. Sunzi designated the king’s two favorite concubines as “officers” of the group and set them on simple drills. When Sunzi shouted his orders, the women began to giggle.
He shouted again… to the same effect.
Sunzi called his two “officers” forward and explained that if the orders are unclear, the fault lies with the commander, but since his orders were clear, the fault must lie with the “officers.” He beheaded the two there in front of the others.
After appointing two replacements, Sunzi gave the command and the entire regimen followed dutifully.
As the story goes, upon successfully completing King Helü’s challenge Sunzi drafted the 13 chapters of the Art of War. But, as the Sunzi expert, Paul Goldin, has pointed out:
“the vocabulary of the text is not in keeping with the world of 500 BC. One specific anachronism is that Sunzi refers to crossbows and triggers, which were not widely used before the late fourth century. More generally, the philosophical lexicon suggests a milieu in which concepts such as Heaven and the Way had already become influential. Although the author or authors of Sunzi may have had real combat experience, one of its rhetorical purposes was to carve out a place for military affairs in philosophical discourse.”
In 1972, a bamboo scroll was discovered at Yinqueshan, in Shandong, inside a tomb dated to the Han dynasty. It contained both the Sunzi Bingfa and another military treatise called the Sun BIN Bingfa… which shows that this text was already part of a healthy tradition by the end of the Warring States period.
We also know that, by the Song dynasty, the Sunzi Bingfa had been canonized as one of the “seven military classics” and the Sun Bin Bingfa had been lost. But, probably never in its history was Sunzi’s “Art of War” considered the DEFINITIVE work on military strategy.
The central idea of the text is: Win without conflict. In order to attain that goal , it offers various strategic recommendations, including:
- Understanding strategic positions,
- Collecting competitive information & recognizing opportunities,
- Selecting tactics that minimize loss and avoid dangerous situations,
- Recognizing the specifics of situations and the responses they elicit,
- Getting the most out of each tactic and securing advantages.
Most translations fail to capture how the Sunzi attempts to elevate discourse on military tactics by repurposing established philosophical principles. Again, Paul Goldin explains, by noting the ideograms used in the opening passage:
一曰道，二曰天，三曰地，四曰將，五曰法。 (Sunzi 1)
“Anyone who does not look at the Chinese original will be astonished to learn that, aside from jiang 將 (the commander), Sunzi’s “factors” are all extremely familiar philosophical keywords: dao (the Way), tian (Heaven), di (Earth), and fa [Law]… Sunzi anticipates an audience well versed in classical philosophical literature and argues that “the commander” should be added to everybody’s list of technical terms.”
Yet, in the centuries following the collapse of the later Han dynasty, Chinese commanders would be steeped in philosophical thinking — including the Sunzi Bingfa.
Bingfa Principles
There are 6 core strategies presented in the Sunzi Bingfa that seem central to the tradition as a whole.
1) Win All Without Fighting:
“to fight and conquer in all your battles is not supreme excellence; supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy’s resistance without fighting.” — Sunzi 3:2
2) Avoid Strength, Attack Weakness:
“So in war, the way is to avoid what is strong and to strike at what is weak.” — Sunzi 6:30
3) Foreknowledge:
“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.” — Sunzi 3:18
4) Speed and Preparation:
“though we have heard of stupid haste in war, cleverness has never been seen associated with long delays.” — Sunzi 2:5
5) Shaping the Opponent:
“a wise general makes a point of foraging on the enemy. One cartload of the enemy’s provisions is equivalent to twenty of one’s own.” — Sunzi 2:15
6) Character-based Leadership:
“The Commander stands for the virtues of wisdom, sincerity, benevolence, courage and strictness… These five heads should be familiar to every general: he who knows them will be victorious; he who knows them not will fail.” — Sunzi 1:9
There’s a story found in the Ming-dynasty epic novel Sānguózhì Pínghuà (The Romance of the Three Kingdoms) that illustrates perfectly how these principles might’ve been employed on a battlefield. It depicts the ingenious way that Zhuge Liang of Shu prepared for the Battle of Chibi.
The Battle of Chibi (or Red Cliffs) was a famous fight between the tenuously allied forces of Liu Bei of Shu (Zhuge Liang’s lord) and Sun Quan of Wu (who claimed descendancy from Sunzi himself) pitted against the much larger and better-financed army of Cao Cao of Wei.
Whoever emerged victorious would gain control of the Yangtze River — a major East-West thoroughfare.
Because of Zhuge Liang’s renowned brilliance (and the eventual threat he might pose to Sun Quan’s forces after their temporary alliance broke), the Wu strategists assigned him an impossible task — procure 100,000 arrows, in three days, with almost no lumber.
Incredibly, Zhuge Liang accepted.
He had the troops pile straw onto every available boat and then launched the fleet towards the enemy embankment under the cover of heavy fog. From the riverbank, his troops shouted and beat their drums, harrying Cao Cao’s archers into thinking it was a surprise attack.
Volley after volley rained down onto those empty straw boats that were barely visible through the thick fog. Once Zhuge Liang estimated they’d collected enough of the enemy arrows, he ordered the boats pulled back to shore.
In this way, Zhuge Liang vindicated his reputation and helped secure a much needed victory over Cao Cao. To this day, whenever someone talks about using an opponent’s own strength against them, they may say, “Cǎo chuán jiè jiàn,” (Borrow arrows with thatched boats, 草船借箭).
Which of the 6 Core Strategies would you say are on display in Zhuge Liang’s tactic?
Other Works of Bingfa
There are two other works on military strategy worth mentioning. The first is Sun Bin Bingfa — which as I noted above was lost until 1972.
Two noted comparativists, D.C. Lau and Roger Ames, have co-translated the recovered Sun Bin Bingfa text. This is how they’ve described it:
“Sun Bin’s Art of Warfare is an essential text of Chinese military philosophy and of strategy in general. This book, lost for over two thousand years and rediscovered only in 1972, has not yet reached the prominence of Sunzi’s Art of War. Sun Bin’s work is an indispensable companion to the work of Sunzi, who is believed to be his ancestor, and deserves to be better known in its own right, both philosophically and historically.”
Their translation includes the 16 chapters that are are thought to properly belong to the Sun Bin, 15 “supplemental” chapters found at the same dig-site, and 3 chapters recovered from commentaries, testimonies, and fragments from later texts referencing Sun Bin — who was widely thought to be the same person as Sunzi before the 1972 recovery of his work.
Joseph Needham and Krzysztof Gawlikowski have distinguished the two according to the following:
“Sun Bin was a descendant of the great Sun Wu, but whereas his ancestor discussed the theoretical foundations of the art of war, Sun Bin, on the other hand, enters into various matters of detail, and approaches specific problems differently.” (p.22)
Very little scholarship has been done on the philosophical importance of the Sun Bin —a fact that Lau and Ames' translation will hopefully change. As they assert, the Sun Bin is far from being a mere technician’s guidebook and is, instead, “the remnant of a philosophical classic.”
Another military text worth mentioning is the short collection of tactics known as the Sān Shí Liù Jì [三十六計], or 36 Stratagems.
Although the authorship of the text is uncertain, this short collection of 36 proverbs is considered a cultural mainstay in China. As John Barkai puts it:
“In China, the tactics are somewhat like proverbs or folklore. They have been described as “gems that speak to the core of Chinese society.” Chinese children learn them just like Americans learn nursery rhymes. They are taught in school, found in literature, popular folk opera, and sometimes even in television programs. It is said that these strategies have become part of the “collective unconscious” of most Chinese people… Just about anyone who has “grown up Chinese” (meaning that they have grown up in a Chinese home that respects and teaches Chinese traditions) know these Thirty-six Strategies.”
While the other bingfa texts focus mainly on the martial principles of direct conflict, the Thirty-Six Stratagems focus more on the diplomacy and espionage of indirect conflict. As an epigraph of unknown origin states at the beginning of the text:
六六三十六,| Six sixes are thirty-six,
数中有術， | Within numbers there are techniques,
術中有数。 | Within techniques there are numbers.
陰陽燮理， | The harmonizing principles of yinyang,
機在其中。 | function here among these.
機不可設， | The function cannot be obvious,
設则不中。 | if obvious, they’d miss the target.
The traditional text is very short — only 138 Chinese characters in total. Its six main topics are:
I. Superior position
II. Confrontation
III. Attack
IV. Confused situations
V. Gaining ground
VI. Desperate situations
Each topic lists six stratagems, which aren’t much more than a title and a brief description. To supplement the original text, many contemporary versions include historical or literary illustrations of each proverb.
Even tactics with which we’re all familiar — like the ‘double-cross,’ the ‘frame job,’ or the ‘bait and switch,’ find their analog in stratagems like ‘Hide the Dagger Behind a Smile’, ‘Kill With a Borrowed Sword’, and ‘Toss out a Brick to Attract Jade.’
The stratagems have been variously attributed to Sunzi, Sun Bin, Tan Daoji, and even Zhuge Liang… but they’re probably much more recent than that (perhaps from the Ming or Qing dynasties) and likely reflect a longstanding oral tradition.
To illustrate how these ideas might be philosophically repurposed for our own time, consider Linda Tan’s presentation on how she used the stratagems to control the pests in her rice farming business…
Well, that’s it for this installment. Only one left to go!
In Part 22, we’ll turn our attention to Buddhism, the only classical Chinese philosophy not originating on native soil.
Hope to see you there!
