Win without fighting. Sun Tzu ranks that above winning every battle: the highest skill is to make the enemy quit before the armies ever meet. Subdue him whole. Take his country intact instead of wrecking it. The famous clash of armies sits near the bottom of his list, not the top.
The Art of War is about twenty-five centuries old, maybe six thousand Chinese characters, thirteen short chapters. It was written for kings running real armies through one of the bloodiest stretches of Chinese history, and Sun Tzu, if one person by that name wrote it, may be a legend stitched together later. Today the book is quoted by people who will never stand on a battlefield: football coaches, startup founders, litigators, the corporate raiders of the 1980s. We will get to how it left the battlefield. First, what it actually says.
The Chinese is ancient and terse, and the translators do not agree. Classical Chinese leaves out tenses and articles, and one character can carry a stack of meanings at once, so each translator has to decide what a line means before they can write it in English, and they decide differently. The book's coldest claim, near the end of chapter one, is five characters: 兵者，詭道也. Here it is a few ways.
兵者，詭道也chapter 1 · five characters that turn the whole book amoral
- All warfare is based on deception.Giles, 1910
- A military operation involves deception.Cleary, 1988
- Warfare is the art (tao) of deceit.Ames, 1993
- The Way of War is a Way of Deception.Minford, 2002
- Warfare is a way of deception.Mair, 2007
Same five characters. Some keep it flat, a plain rule of thumb. Others hold onto the older, stranger word, the way of deception, because the character for "way" here is 道, the same loaded dao that titles the Tao Te Ching. And the character for "deceit" means strange and uncanny as much as it means false, so a careful reader hears wrong-footing the enemy as much as lying to him. None of them is wrong. That spread is the subject of this page.
Below are fifteen passages, the load-bearing ones, the claims the rest of the book leans on. I left most of the treatise out on purpose: more than half of it is a field manual (how to feed an army, read the ground, set fires, run spies) and reads like one. These are the keystones. For each you get the Chinese, a plain breakdown of what it is doing and where the translators part ways, then every English version I could find, stacked so you can read them against each other. Use the arrows or your keyboard to move between them.
How a war manual became a business book
For most of its life this was a Chinese military classic, one of seven, read by generals and almost nobody else in the West. That changed fast. In 1963 a US Marine brigadier general named Samuel Griffith published a translation through Oxford, with a foreword by the strategist B. H. Liddell Hart, and it became required reading for Western officers. Then it jumped the fence. In the 1987 film Wall Street, Gordon Gekko tells his protege to read Sun Tzu: "Every battle is won before it is ever fought." Thomas Cleary's paperback landed in 1988 and sold and sold. Bill Belichick keeps it in the locker room. Brazil's 2002 World Cup coach slid passages under his players' doors.
Some of this travels honestly. Know yourself and your competitor, win cheaply, do not grind out a war of attrition, attack weakness and not strength, set things up so you have already won before you commit. Those move from the battlefield to a boardroom without much strain. A lot of the book does not: the chapters on chariot costs, fording rivers, and which of five fires to set are stuck in 5th-century-BCE China. Gekko's line is not even a real sentence in the book, it is a tidy compression of the win-first idea in chapter four. So read the modern uses as a real thing that happened, and draw your own lines. The passages below are the originals. They are stranger, and better, than the slogans they turned into.
Where the text comes from
Every translation here is reproduced verbatim, quoted for comparison and study with each translator named. A few of them keep punctuation the rest of this site does not use; that is the source's own, left as printed. The seven run from the public-domain standard to the newest scholarship.
- The Chinese is the received text, from the Chinese Text Project, normalized to orthodox traditional characters.
- Lionel Giles (1910) is the public-domain standard, the first fully annotated English version, still the most quoted because it is free. From Project Gutenberg.
- Samuel B. Griffith (1963, Oxford), the soldier's translation. Thomas Cleary (1988, Shambhala), the best-selling popular one, with the classical commentators. Roger T. Ames (1993, Ballantine), built on the 1972 bamboo manuscript. The Denma Translation Group (2001, Shambhala), prized for fidelity to the terse original. John Minford (2002, Penguin), the literary one, set as verse. Victor H. Mair (2007, Columbia), the philologist, who thinks Sun Tzu never existed.
The breakdowns are mine. They lean on the standard scholarship for the contested lines, especially the word shi, which no two translators render the same way and which the French sinologist François Jullien spent a book calling "propensity." Where the famous line is usually misquoted (the one about knowing yourself and the enemy promises you will not be in danger, never that you will win), I have tried to say so rather than pass the inflation along. Denma and Mair each translate fewer than fifteen of these passages here, because I quote only what I could source verbatim and a few of theirs I could not pin down.
The photograph on the homepage card is the actual book: bamboo slips of the Art of War excavated in 1972 at Yinqueshan, in Linyi, Shandong, and dated to the 2nd century BCE, the oldest physical copy ever found. Photo by AlexHe34, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0. The find also settled a long argument by proving Sun Tzu's book and his descendant Sun Bin's were two different texts, not one.