A Note on the Translation

This is a complete translation of the Sunzi bingfa, the thirteen chapters on war traditionally ascribed to Sun Wu, made directly from the Classical Chinese. No earlier English version was used as its basis. The source is a public-domain digital transcription of the received text, the thirteen-chapter form that has been standard since Cao Cao wrote his commentary on it early in the third century AD. “Sun Tzu,” the name by which the book is known in English, means “Master Sun.” We keep it for the author and in the phrase that opens every chapter, “Sun Tzu said”; all other Chinese names are given in pinyin.

The transcription has a number of misprints, most of them characters wrongly restored from simplified forms. We have corrected them silently by the received text. Where a correction changes the sense of a passage (in chapters XI and XII), a short note says so. The transcription prints chapters VII to XIII each as a single block; there we have divided the text into paragraphs by content, as in our Korean edition, and those paragraphs, eighty-eight in all, are kept one for one. The chapter titles are our own English renderings of the Chinese ones.

Sun Tzu builds his argument from a handful of words he uses as terms, and each is rendered by one English word throughout. Shi is “momentum,” the force a situation stores up, like water rushing downhill or a drawn crossbow; xing is “form,” the visible disposition of an army. Qi and zheng are “the unorthodox and the orthodox,” the surprise move and the expected one. Xu and shi, which name the sixth chapter, are “the empty and the full.” The first of the five factors in chapter I, dao, is “the Way”; elsewhere the same word is simply a way or a road.

The text speaks in statements and commands, and so does the translation. It does not address a reader as “you,” and nothing from the commentators has been folded into it. Spelling and punctuation are American. The twenty-two notes are short and factual: persons, states, measures, and the few places where the text or its reading is in question.