Philosophers From China

"Sun Tzu’s success teaches us that a successful general is one who fully calculates his approach and plans to fight in a battle. However, the average reader is not able to identify Sun Tzu’s teachings on a deeper or philosophical level. This is my reason for writing and exegeses on the Art of War."

"諸將效首虜，（休）畢賀，因問信曰：「兵法右倍山陵，前左水澤，今者將軍令臣等反背水陳，曰破趙會食，臣等不服。然竟以勝，此何術也？」信曰：「此在兵法，顧諸君不察耳。兵法不曰『陷之死地而後生，置之亡地而後存』？且信非得素拊循士大夫也，此所謂『驅市人而戰之』，其勢非置之死地，使人人自為戰；今予之生地，皆走，寧尚可得而用之乎！」諸將皆服曰：「善。非臣所及也。」"

"吳王曰：「將軍罷休就舍，寡人不願下觀。」孫子曰：「王徒好其言，不能用其實。」於是闔廬知孫子能用兵，卒以為將。西破彊楚，入郢，北威齊晉，顯名諸侯，孫子與有力焉。"

"Fear is the true enemy, the only enemy."

"In peace, prepare for war. In war, prepare for peace."

"Opportunities multiply as they are seized."

"The true objective of war is peace."

"Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat."

"Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer."

"Victory is reserved for those who are willing to pay its price."

"Engage people with what they expect; it is what they are able to discern and confirms their projections. It settles them into predictable patterns of response, occupying their minds while you wait for the extraordinary moment — that which they cannot anticipate."

"Build your opponent a golden bridge to retreat across."

"It seems to me that The Art of War codifies the principles of kung fu, the martial arts: to co-operate with the enemy, to prevent all-out war when possible. I remember reading a lot of pages devoted to fighting with fire, and burning down cities. Devotion to tactics rather than ethics. I have a figurine of Gwan Goong, god of war and literature, reading a book. That book is The Art of War."

"By contrast, classical China produced many great generals, fought many wars and conquered many peoples but did not elevate military values above civilian. (It helped, perhaps, that the scholars rather than the military wrote the histories.) Fighting was not held up as something admirable but rather as the result of a breakdown in order and propriety. There is no equivalent of the Iliad in Chinese literature and the heroes held up for the young to emulate were the great bureaucrats and wise rulers who maintained the peace. Early on Chinese thinkers such as Confucius and the great strategist Sunzi (also known in the transliteration Sun Tzu) stressed that the state’s authority rested on its virtue as well as on its ability to use force. And for Sunzi, the greatest general was the one who could win a war, through manoeuvre or trickery, without fighting a battle. Prestige in Chinese society came rather from being a scholar, poet or painter; and from the Tang dynasty onwards the examination system to enter the imperial civil service was the favoured path for fame and prestige. Successful generals were sometimes awarded a scholar’s rank and gown as a mark of particular favour where many European societies would have given military decorations to meritorious civilians."

"In the famous Chinese treatise The Art of War, Sunzi laid down precepts which succeeding generations studied carefully, among them the famous ‘Know the enemy and know yourself, and you can fight a hundred battles with no danger of defeat’ and ‘He will win who knows when to fight and when not to fight.’ He also had specific advice, with lists of key factors, situations or types of actions, on the various phases of war, from making the plans to choosing the right terrain to fight. From the Qin Emperor to Mao Zedong, The Art of War has provided leaders throughout China and Asia with guidelines for how to win a war. General Vo Nguyen Giap, the architect of Vietnam’s victories against the French in the 1950s and the Americans a decade later, was an admirer, as are the Western business people who have flocked to buy The Complete Sun Tzu for Business Success: Use the Classic Rules of The Art of War to Win the Battle for Customers and Conquer the Competition or The Art of War for Women: Sun Tzu’s Ancient Strategies and Wisdom for Winning at Work. Perhaps they like his assertion that ‘All warfare is based on deception’ or enjoy his passages on the importance of the strong leader for victory, and it must help that The Art of War itself is short and consists of pithy maxims."

"The one thing missing from The Art of War is love, ... any sense of altruism, any sense of loving your neighbor. It's just a[bout] how to take advantage of your neighbor, how to triumph over your neighbor, how to manipulate your neighbor. I'm sorry... It's a very nasty book. How to use your spies — that chapter thirteen on spies — is chilling. The whole book — of course it's very clever, and of course a lot of it is very true, and of course we can go through life treating people in that way if you want to, but I don't happen to believe that's the best way to go. ... The Lúnyǔ [Analects of Confucius] is a superior book to Sūnzi bīngfǎ [The Art of War] because the Lúnyǔ talks about morality, talks about caring for your fellow human being; after all, the whole idea of ren ... doesn't come in Sūnzi bīngfǎ at all. Sūnzi bīngfǎ is: how to use your friends and neighbors in order to get the better of them. That doesn't make me feel good. I'm an old-fashioned kind of guy, and I believe in being nice to people whenever I can. ... You don't go out of your way like Sun Tzu to manipulate everybody including your friends. For me, Sūnzi bīngfǎ is the dark side of Chinese culture. It's the dark side. And, I know it's there. And there's a dark side to Western culture too. And, therefore, it's important to be aware of it, but not to be corrupted by it. Not to be polluted by it. Because it is a very powerfully-polluting little book. Very nasty little book. Let's not pretend otherwise."

"此兵之要，三軍之所恃而動也。"

"故三軍之事，莫親於間，賞莫厚於間，事莫密於間"

"故明君賢將，所以動而勝人，成功出於衆者，先知也。"

"敵間之來間我者，因而利之，導而捨之，故反間可得而用也；"

"非利不動，非得不用，非危不戰。主不可以怒而興師，將不可以慍而致戰；合于利而動，不合于利而止。怒可以復喜，慍可以復悅，亡國不可以復存，死者不可以復生。故明君慎之，良將警之，此安國全軍之道也。"

"施無法之賞，懸無政之令。犯三軍之眾，若使一人。"

"兵之情主速，乘敵所不及，由不虞之途，攻其所不備也。"

"吾士無余財，非惡貨也。無余命，非惡壽也。"

"視卒如愛子，故可與之俱死。"

"No, the enjoyment of an idle life doesn't cost any money. The capacity for true enjoyment of idleness is lost in the moneyed class and can be found only among people who have a supreme contempt for wealth. It must come from an inner richness of the soul in a man who loves the simple ways of life and who is somewhat impatient with the business of making money."

"What is patriotism but love of the good things we ate in our childhood? I have said elsewhere that the loyalty to Uncle Sam is the loyalty to doughnuts and ham and sweet potatoes and the loyalty to the German Vaterland is the loyalty to Pfannkuchen and Christmas Stollen. As for international understanding, I feel that macaroni has done more for our appreciation of Italy than Mussolini... in food, as in death, we feel the essential brotherhood of mankind."

"He who perceives death perceives a sense of the human comedy, and quickly becomes a poet."

"A man may own a thousand acres of land, and yet he still sleeps upon a bed of five feet."

"Instead of holding on to the Biblical view that we are made in the image of God, we come to realize that we are made in the image of the monkey."

"Human life can be lived like a poem."

"One can learn such a lot and enjoy such a lot in seventy years, and three generations is a long, long time to see human follies and acquire human wisdom. Anyone who is wise and has lived long enough to witness the changes of fashion and morals and politics through the rise and fall of three generations should be perfectly satisfied to rise from his seat and go away saying, "It was a good show," when the curtain falls."

"A reasonable naturalist then settles down to this life with a sort of animal satisfaction. As Chinese illiterate women put it, "Others gave birth to us and we give birth to others. What else are we to do?".... Life becomes a biological procession and the very question of immortality is sidetracked. For that is the exact feeling of a Chinese grandfather holding his grandchild by the hand and going to the shops to buy some candy, with the thought that in five or ten years he will be returning to his grave or to his ancestors. The best that we can hope for in this life is that we shall not have sons and grandsons of whom we need to be ashamed."

"All men and women have passions, natural desires and noble ambitions, and also a conscience; they have sex, hunger, fear, anger, and are subject to sickness, pain, suffering and death. Culture consists in bringing about the expression of these passions and desires in harmony."

"To me personally, the only function of philosophy is to teach us to take life more lightly and gayly than the average businessman does, for no businessman who does not retire at fifty, if he can, is in my eyes a philosopher."

"The world I believe is far too serious, and being far too serious, is it has need of a wise and merry philosophy."

"I do not think that any civilization can be called complete until it has progressed from sophistication to unsophistication, and made a conscious return to simplicity of thinking and living, and I call no man wise until he has made the progress from the wisdom of knowledge to the wisdom of foolishness, and become a laughing philosopher, feeling first life's tragedy and then life's comedy. For we must weep before we can laugh. Out of sadness comes the awakening, and out of the awakening comes the laughter of the philosopher, with kindliness and tolerance to boot."

"I am doing my best to glorify the scamp or vagabond. I hope I shall succeed. For things are not so simple as they sometimes seem. In this present age of threats to democracy and individual liberty, probably only the scamp and the spirit of the scamp alone will save us from being lost in serially numbered units in the masses of disciplined, obedient, regimented and uniformed coolies. The scamp will be the last and most formidable enemy of dictatorships. He will be the champion of human dignity and individual freedom, and will be the last to be conquered. All modern civilization depends entirely upon him."

"True peace of mind comes from accepting the worst."

"The three great American vices seem to be efficiency, punctuality, and the desire for achievement and success. They are the things that make the Americans so unhappy and so nervous."

"A man who has to be punctually at a certain place at five o'clock has the whole afternoon from one to five ruined for him already."

"If the early Chinese people had any chivalry, it was manifested not toward women and children, but toward old people. That feeling of chivalry found clear expression in Mencius in some such saying as, "The people with gray hair should not be seen carrying burdens on the street," which was expressed as the final goal of good government."

"Life after all is made up of eating and sleeping, of meeting and saying good-by to friends, of reunions and farewell parties, of tears and laughter, of having a haircut once in two weeks, of watering a potted flower and watching one’s neighbor fall off his roof."

"There is something in the nature of tea that leads us into a world of quiet contemplation of life."

"The greatest ideal that man can aspire to is not to be a show-case of virtue, but just to be a genial, likable and reasonable human being."

"The Chinese do not draw any distinction between food and medicine."

"By association with nature's enormities, a man's heart may truly grow big also. There is a way of looking upon a landscape as a moving picture and being satisfied with nothing less big as a moving picture, a way of looking upon tropic clouds over the horizon as the backdrop of a stage and being satisfied with nothing less big as a backdrop, a way of looking upon the mountain forests as a private garden and being satisfied with nothing less as a private garden, a way of listening to the roaring waves as a concert and being satisfied with nothing less as a concert, and a way of looking upon the mountain breeze as an air-cooling system and being satisfied with nothing less as an air-cooling system. So do we become big, even as the earth and firmaments are big. Like the "Big Man" described by Yuan Tsi (A.D. 210-263), one of China's first romanticists, we "live in heaven and earth as our house.""

"When the mirror meets with an ugly woman, when a rare ink-stone finds a vulgar owner, and when a good sword is in the hands of a common general, there is utterly nothing to be done about it."

"A good traveler is one who does not know where he is going to, and a perfect traveler does not know where he came from."

"The wise man reads both books and life itself."