The Art of War - Rilegato

Sun-Tzu; Minford, John

Rilegato

ISBN 10: 0670031569 ISBN 13: 9780670031566

Casa editrice: Viking Pr, 2002

Riassunto

An accessible new translation considers the author's lifetime and the context of his work in light of the Warring States period, providing two copies of the original text, one verbatim and the other complemented by running commentary by the translator and by classical Chinese scholars. 17,500 first printing.

Su questo libro

L'autore:

John Minford studied Chinese at Oxford and has taught in China, Hong Kong, and New Zealand. His highly regarded translations from the Chinese include two volumes of the Penguin Classics edition of Cao Xueqin's eighteenth-century novel, The Story of the Stone. He is the coeditor of the landmark volume Classical Chinese Literature: An Anthology of Translations and the coeditor of Seeds of Fire: Chinese Voices of Conscience.

Estratto. © Riproduzione autorizzata. Diritti riservati.:

The Way of War is a Way of Deception.
-Master Sun, Chapter 1

Introduction

Master Sun's short treatise The Art of War is both inspirational and worrying. It is beautiful and chilling. It encapsulates a part of the irreducible essence of Chinese culture and has been familiar to literate Chinese down the ages. For that reason alone, it is an extraordinarily important book and one that should be read by anyone dealing with either China or Japan. During the Second World War, E. Machell-Cox produced a version for the Royal Air Force. "Master Sun," he wrote, "is fundamental and, read with insight, lays bare the mental mechanism of our enemy. Study him, and study him again. Do not be misled by his simplicity."1 Today, with China playing a more and more integral role in the world, Master Sun has become prescribed reading for global entrepreneurs. "Ultimate excellence lies not in winning every battle but in defeating the enemy without ever fighting" (Chapter 3). Or, in the words of Gordon Gekko, the corporate raider in Oliver Stone's brilliant exposé of late-twentieth-century American capitalism, Wall Street, "I bet on sure things. Sun Tzu: 'Every battle is won before it is fought.' Think about it."

But The Art of War offers more than an insight into Chinese ways of doing things (including business). Like its venerable predecessor The Book of Changes, it lends itself to infinite applications. It has been used as a springboard for an American self-help book about interpersonal relationships.2 It could no doubt also serve as the basis for a book on tennis, cooking, or defensive driving. The strategic advice it offers concerns much more than the conduct of war. It is an ancient book of proverbial wisdom, a book of life.

Cunning Plans, Popular Culture
The Empty City

The novel The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, written sometime in the fourteenth or fifteenth century, has been described as a vernacular expansion of Master Sun's ideas, a novelistic "folk manual of waging war, a description of the classical strategic and tactical solutions which were a part of the ancient theory of war, a popular lecture on classical theory [of warfare]."3 In a scene from Chapter 38, the most famous of all China's strategic wizards, Zhuge Liang (181-234), the "Sleeping Dragon," finally meets Liu Bei (161-223), pretender to the throne of the crumbling Han dynasty. This is Liu's third visit to the recluse's hermitage, his two previous visits having proved fruitless. The Dragon is at home, and Liu meets him face-to-face, a striking figure in his silken headscarf and Taoist-style robe lined with cranesdown, emanating the "buoyant air of a spiritual transcendent."4 Liu eventually succeeds in recruiting the hermit's services, and the Dragon, "though having never left his thatched cottage," proceeds to "demonstrate his foreknowledge of the balance of power." He goes on to mastermind Liu's military campaign with extraordinary cunning. One of the most famous of the Dragon's many strategic victories occurs some twenty years later, in the year a.d. 228, five years after the death of Liu Bei himself. Chapter 95 of the novel finds Zhuge cornered in the city of Xicheng (West City), with a paltry force of five thousand, against one hundred and fifty thousand troops of the northern state of Wei, led by the redoubtable marshal Sima Yi:

The Sleeping Dragon dispatched half of his troops to transfer the grain and fodder from the city to where the main body of his forces was encamped, which left him with a mere 2,500 soldiers in the city. [The astute seventeenth-century commentator Mao Zong'gang observes at this point: Twenty-five hundred against one hundred and fifty thousand? Let's see how Master Sleeping Dragon manages to get out of this one!] His officers were aghast at the state of affairs. Sleeping Dragon mounted the battlements to view the situation for himself, and sure enough he could make out the two columns of the huge Wei army, raising an enormous twin cloud of dust into the sky as they converged on the city. He now gave orders to conceal all military flags and pennants [Mao: Strange! Weird!], and announced that all the soldiers were to stay within their billets. Any discovered wandering around or making a din were to be instantly decapitated. [Decidedly weird!] He ordered the four gates of the city to be thrown open, and at each gate posted twenty soldiers in civilian attire, with instructions to go about casually sprinkling the ground and sweeping the streets. [Weirder and weirder! Where twenty-five hundred could not withstand one hundred and fifty thousand, twenty can! Highly ingenious!] "When the enemy arrives," ordered Zhuge Liang, "no one is to make a move. Leave everything to me. I have a plan." [I wonder what Sleeping Dragon has up his sleeve?]

The Master then donned his Taoist robe lined with finest cranesdown, and his silken headscarf, and made his way up to the watchtower above the main gate, accompanied by two page-boys and carrying his lute. There he lit incense and sat calmly playing an air on his lute. [Weird! Ingenious! Just like the olden days in his hermitage! Doubtless the air he was playing on the silken strings of his lute was going to annihilate the enem. . . . ]

The scouts of Marshal Sima Yi, the enemy commander-in-chief, had meanwhile arrived before the city, and seeing this strange state of affairs, did not venture within the walls but hurried back to report to their general. Sima laughed, and found it hard to believe what they were telling him. [So do I, to this very day!] He ordered his troops to halt their advance, and galloped ahead to a vantage point from which he could observe matters for himself. Sure enough, he espied Sleeping Dragon seated up above the gateway, a smile on his face as he played his lute, surrounded by clouds of incense. To his left stood one page-boy, holding a ceremonial sword; to his right another page-boy, with a fly-whisk, emblem of the Taoist priest-magician. Within and without the gate, twenty-odd townsfolk could be seen casually cleaning the street. There was not another soul in sight.

Marshal Sima was filled with misgivings. [So am I, to this very day! It must have been a most extraordinary sight!] He returned to his army, and ordered his men to turn around and head north into the hills. His son protested: "Surely Sleeping Dragon is doing this precisely because he has no troops. Why are you retreating, Father?" [Smarter than his father . . . ] "I know Sleeping Dragon," replied the Marshal. "He has always been a man of great caution. He never takes risks. I am sure that this throwing open of the gates is simply a ruse. He has definitely set an ambush for us. If we go in, we walk straight into his trap. You are too young to understand. No, we must retreat with all speed."

So both columns of the Wei army turned around and retreated. Zhuge, seeing them go, laughed and clapped his hands. His officers were astonished, and begged their commander for an explication. [No doubt Sleeping Dragon had chanted some sort of "Spell for a Retreat" as he played his lute. . . . ] "The Marshal has always known me for a cautious man," Zhuge began. "He knows I never take risks. He was bound to suspect an ambush. That is why he decided to retreat. [He knew that his enemy was familiar with his character; and therefore he acted out of character. . . . Brilliant! Genius!] I wasn't gambling. I simply had no other option. . . ."

His officers were dumbfounded at their commander's inscrutable genius.5

Two of the early commentators on Master Sun's Art of War tell a briefer version of this same story (which is probably apocryphal-historically speaking, Marshal Sima Yi seems to have been somewhere else at the time). Their comments come immediately after the Master's statement in Chapter 6: "If I do not wish to engage, I can hold my ground with nothing more than a line drawn around it. The enemy cannot engage me in combat; I distract him in a different direction." Certainly Zhuge Liang the wizard had little more than a line between himself and the massive Wei army. The "Ruse of the Empty City," as it came to be known, was graphically retold by many a medieval storyteller and went on to become a subject for opera and for popular woodblock prints (nianhua-in some of these the Dragon completes the picture of relaxation by having a cup of wine before him).6 It forms the thirty-second of The Thirty-six Stratagems (a popular condensation of traditional Chinese strategic wisdom, of obscure origin), where it is presented as a clever psychological strategy for use in desperate circumstances. It is also used to illustrate the forty-third of The Hundred Unusual Strategies (another popular compilation, probably from the Song dynasty).7 Here the "unusual strategy" being advocated is the subtle use of illusion, of deception or bluff, against a numerically superior enemy, what Joseph Needham calls "obtaining the desired effect through a discreet use of appearances, thereby avoiding an actual battle."8 Both of these late popular works were based largely on Master Sun's much older treatise. Zhuge Liang, the Sleeping Dragon, is himself (improbably) credited with a short work on the Art of War,9 while Cao Cao, Zhuge's adversary in his early campaigns (he is already dead by the time of the Empty City), is the prime commentator on Master Sun's Art of War.10 Both Cao Cao and the Sleeping Dragon are household names in China, emblems of military skill and strategic cunning, while Master Sun's Art of War and The Three Kingdoms have continued to fascinate the Chinese popular imagination into the twenty-first century.11 Both the treatise and the novel exercised a considerable influence on Chairman Mao, and in its recent lavish television serialization, The Three Kingdoms captured a huge audience in China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. Cartoon-strip versions of The Art of War enjoy large sales throughout the Chinese-speaking world, while the number of Web sites (in Chinese, Japanese, and English) devoted to Master Sun continues to grow.12

From Proverbial to Popular Culture

The...

Su questa edizione

• Editore: Viking Pr
• Data di pubblicazione: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0670031569
• ISBN 13: 9780670031566
• Rilegatura: Copertina rigida
• Numero di pagine: 288