The Art of War | Page 8

Final defeat and extinction of Wu.
The sentence quoted above from VI. ss. 21 hardly strikes me as one that
could have been written in the full flush of victory. It seems rather to
imply that, for the moment at least, the tide had turned against Wu, and
that she was getting the worst of the struggle. Hence we may conclude
that our treatise was not in existence in 505, before which date Yueh
does not appear to have scored any notable success against Wu. Ho Lu
died in 496, so that if the book was written for him, it must have been
during the period 505-496, when there was a lull in the hostilities, Wu
having presumably exhausted by its supreme effort against Ch`u. On
the other hand, if we choose to disregard the tradition connecting Sun
Wu's name with Ho Lu, it might equally well have seen the light
between 496 and 494, or possibly in the period 482-473, when Yueh
was once again becoming a very serious menace. [33] We may feel
fairly certain that the author, whoever he may have been, was not a man
of any great eminence in his own day. On this point the negative
testimony of the TSO CHUAN far outweighs any shred of authority
still attaching to the SHIH CHI, if once its other facts are discredited.
Sun Hsing-yen, however, makes a feeble attempt to explain the
omission of his name from the great commentary. It was Wu Tzu-hsu,
he says, who got all the credit of Sun Wu's exploits, because the latter
(being an alien) was not rewarded with an office in the State. How then
did the Sun Tzu legend originate? It may be that the growing celebrity
of the book imparted by degrees a kind of factitious renown to its
author. It was felt to be only right and proper that one so well versed in
the science of war should have solid achievements to his credit as well.
Now the capture of Ying was undoubtedly the greatest feat of arms in
Ho Lu's reign; it made a deep and lasting impression on all the
surrounding states, and raised Wu to the short-lived zenith of her power.
Hence, what more natural, as time went on, than that the acknowledged
master of strategy, Sun Wu, should be popularly identified with that
campaign, at first perhaps only in the sense that his brain conceived and
planned it; afterwards, that it was actually carried out by him in
conjunction with Wu Yuan, [34] Po P`ei and Fu Kai? It is obvious that
any attempt to reconstruct even the outline of Sun Tzu's life must be

based almost wholly on conjecture. With this necessary proviso, I
should say that he probably entered the service of Wu about the time of
Ho Lu's accession, and gathered experience, though only in the
capacity of a subordinate officer, during the intense military activity
which marked the first half of the prince's reign. [35] If he rose to be a
general at all, he certainly was never on an equal footing with the three
above mentioned. He was doubtless present at the investment and
occupation of Ying, and witnessed Wu's sudden collapse in the
following year. Yueh's attack at this critical juncture, when her rival
was embarrassed on every side, seems to have convinced him that this
upstart kingdom was the great enemy against whom every effort would
henceforth have to be directed. Sun Wu was thus a well-seasoned
warrior when he sat down to write his famous book, which according to
my reckoning must have appeared towards the end, rather than the
beginning of Ho Lu's reign. The story of the women may possibly have
grown out of some real incident occurring about the same time. As we
hear no more of Sun Wu after this from any source, he is hardly likely
to have survived his patron or to have taken part in the death-struggle
with Yueh, which began with the disaster at Tsui- li. If these inferences
are approximately correct, there is a certain irony in the fate which
decreed that China's most illustrious man of peace should be
contemporary with her greatest writer on war.
The Text of Sun Tzu -------------------
I have found it difficult to glean much about the history of Sun Tzu's
text. The quotations that occur in early authors go to show that the "13
chapters" of which Ssu-ma Ch`ien speaks were essentially the same as
those now extant. We have his word for it that they were widely
circulated in his day, and can only regret that he refrained from
discussing them on that account. Sun Hsing-yen says in his preface: --
During the Ch`in and Han dynasties Sun Tzu's ART OF WAR was in
general use amongst