Art Of War

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    Keywords: Strategy, Culture & History, Books & Publications

"The Art of War", written by Sun Tzu (circa 400-320 BC), summarizes realistic, applicable concepts and principles of war and military strategy in thirteen chapters:

  1. Strategic Assessments
  2. Waging War
  3. Planning a Siege / Attack by Stratagem
  4. Tactical dispositions
  5. Force / Energy
  6. Weak and Strong Points
  7. Maneuvering
  8. Variations in Tactics
  9. Maneuvering / Army on the March
  10. Terrain
  11. Nine Situations
  12. Fire Attacks
  13. Use of Spies

It is the oldest surving text about military strategy, and is still applicable today, not only in the military.

Quotes from "The Art of War" that apply to Go are compiled at Military proverbs.


Links


See also: "Secret Art of War: The 36 Stratagems"


Discussion

Frs: Several English translations exist, which is the best?

BenAxelrod: I recently bought a copy of this book. Picking one out was no easy task because as Frs mentioned, there are 'several' versions of the English translation. (A quick search on [ext] amazon yielded over 5000 results! I found that there are a few flavors of the text, each geared towards different audiences. There are versions for:

I don't really want to promote anything here, but the version i got was very good. Here is its [ext] link on amazon. It included a very faithful translation to one of the oldest versions of the text (bamboo text), three chapters by the translators that put the text into context and help the reader with difficult Chinese concepts, then the translation again this time with commentary. The commentary was not overly intrusive and provided just enough insights so that the reader could draw their own meanings from the text.

What i did in the book store was to read a few lines from the same chapter in every book to see how they differed. This, along with reading the book jacket should give you a pretty good idea as to what kind of translation it is.

I would really like to see a version of the book oriented towards Go. Does anyone know if one exists?


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This is a copy of the living page "Art Of War" at Sensei's Library.
(OC) 2004 the Authors, published under the OpenContent License V1.0.
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