The Art of War

Written from secondary sources (reference descriptions of the treatise and its translations), not from the text.

An ancient Chinese treatise on war in thirteen short chapters, traditionally credited to the general Sun Tzu (“Master Sun”). Its argument is that war is expensive and dangerous to the state that wages it, so the best commander wins before the fighting starts.

The best victory needs no battle: breaking the enemy’s plans beats breaking his army. Long wars ruin the state that fights them, so speed and economy matter more than glory. All warfare rests on deception, seeming weak when strong and far when near. Know the enemy and know yourself; the assessment comes before anything else, and the last chapter argues that spies are worth what they cost. And no formation is right in itself, because the commander adapts to the ground and the circumstance.

Who wrote it, and when, is disputed. Tradition places Sun Tzu in the sixth century BC, scholars now date the text’s completion to roughly the fifth, and some have doubted he existed at all. It is probably a layered tradition gathered under one name. Lionel Giles’s annotated version of 1910 was the first of its kind in English; Samuel Griffith’s of 1963 became a standard.