by An Liu
For a variation on this passage in the reconstructed Zisizi, see Csikszentmihalyi 2004, app. 1, no.27. The Zisizi version does not attribute the passage to Shen Dao.
40. Note that the qualities described here in the explanation do not precisely match those in the sayings.
41. See also WZ 5/26/1–4.
42. See also WZ 4/21/6–11.
43. See also WZ 4/21/13–14.
44. Emending shu neng xing to shu neng xing xing , based on Zhang Shuangdi 1997, 2:1504n.3.
45. Laozi 50.
46. See also WZ 6/33/1–2.
47. The lines beginning “Those who adorn their exterior” to “all the world” also appear in WZ 4/21/14–16.
48. See also WZ 4/21/18–19.
49. See also HSWZ 1.13/3/18–19: “Only those who hide their tracks . . . status.” The preceding couplet, identified as “tradition says,” is closely similar but not identical.
50. See also WZ 4/21/18–21.
51. See also HSWZ 1.13/3/19–20 and WZ 4/21/21–22.
52. See also WZ 5/28/15–18.
53. See also WZ 4/21/24–25.
54. Odes 152.
55. The same image appears in 20.16.
56. For another version of this passage, see HSWZ 4.7/27/9–11.
57. Mr. Bian’s jade disk , also known as Mr. He’s jade disk, was a fabulous jewel that was discovered by Bian He , a man of Chu, in the mountains of that state. When the jade was presented to King Li of Chu as an uncut matrix, the king suspected Bian He of fraud and had his left foot cut off as punishment. When King Li died and Bian He tried to present the jade to his son, King Wu, the king ordered that his right foot be cut off. When King Wu finally had the stone cut and polished, its precious nature was revealed. See also 6.3, 16.19, and 16.90.
58. A fuller version of this statement is found in 20.13.
59. See also WZ 4/21/27–4/22/1.
60. For the notion of the undisturbed or unmoved mind (budongxin ), see Mencius 2A.2.
61. See also WZ 4/22/6–8.
62. See also WZ 4/22/1–3.
63. See also WZ 4/22/3–4.
Fifteen
AN OVERVIEW OF THE MILITARY
AS THE title makes clear, “An Overview of the Military” is devoted to military affairs in a very broad sense. Its purpose is to instruct the ruler in all aspects of this subject, from tactics and strategy to the role of the military in state and society at large. Although it is highly derivative of earlier military literature of the Warring States, it is a unique synthesis of these materials that is in keeping with the broader perspective of the Huainanzi as a whole. In its treatment of the normatively correct principles guiding the monarch’s use of the military, the perspective of chapter 15 dovetails closely, and unsurprisingly, with the political interests of Liu An and his court of Huainan.
The Chapter Title
“Bing lüe” , translated here as “An Overview of the Military,” parallels the title of chapter 21, “Yao lüe” , “An Overview of the Essentials.” The basic meaning of bing is an “edged weapon.” Through a process of metonymy over the course of the Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods, this character came to signify first the common foot soldier who carried a weapon into battle and then, when large infantry armies became the norm, the military and its affairs in the abstract.
Lüe can mean “to plan,” and so this chapter title is sometimes rendered “Military Strategies” or “Military Plans.”1 It can also, as in the case of this chapter and chapter 21, have the sense of “overview” or “general summation.” As we demonstrate, this chapter draws on and gives an overview of the large body of military writing that already existed in the early Han period. The same impulse to “survey the field” likely informed the similarly titled “Bing shu lüe” (An Overview of Military Writings), which Liu Xiang (ca. 77–ca. 6 B.C.E.) eventually included in his Qi lüe (Seven General Categories),2 the first known attempt to systematically classify the written legacy of the empire.
As the chapter summary in chapter 21 makes clear, “An Overview of the Military” not only discusses “the techniques of battle, victory, assault, and capture,” but also
is what [enables you] to
know that when you form for battle or deploy to fight contrary to the Way, it will not work;
know that when you assault and capture or fortify and defend contrary to Moral Potency, it will not be formidable. (21.2)
In other words, the chapter is not concerned exclusively with tactics and strategy but encompasses the larger cosmic patterns and ethical norms that constrain the use of military force. Moreover, when chapter 21 enumerates the chapter themes by demonstrating their organic integrity, it explains the segue from chapter 15 to chapter 16 as follows:
To know grand overviews but not know analogies and illustrations,
you would lack the means to clarify affairs by elaboration. (21.3)
This shows that the Huainanzi authors viewed chapter 15 as not simply a treatise on military affairs but also a well-crafted literary work exemplary of an “overview” as a generic form. Thus we render the title of chapter 15 as “An Overview of the Military.”
Summary and Key Themes
A number of words are used in chapter 15 (and elsewhere in the Huainanzi) in a technical sense derived from the military literature of the Warring States. One example of this is the distinction between the “extraordinary” and the “usual.”3 Earlier texts like the Wuzi, Weiliaozi, and Sunzi4 worked these terms into a theory of the tactical dialectic ruling the field of battle: the skilled commander must know the “usual” tactics to be applied in each situation, but he must always be ready to achieve surprise by producing an “extraordinary” tactical innovation (and correspondingly be prepared for the same from his opponent). Thus when the Huainanzi declares that “the mutual response of the extraordinary and the usual are like [the way that] water, fire, metal, and wood take turns being servant and master” (15.23), it is asserting a fundamental correlation between the dynamics of the battlefield and those of the basic energies of the cosmos. Most of these uses of technical vocabulary from the earlier literature are glossed in the notes or included in appendix A, but two terms merit special discussion here.
The first is quan . One of its original meanings is, as a verb, “to weigh” and, as a noun, the weight used in conjunction with a scale for measuring weight. From this root, other meanings, such as “authority,” were derived during the Warring States period. The image of the scales informs most usages of quan in Warring States military texts and generally refers to a capacity that enables a unit or its commander to achieve certain outcomes (“tip the scales”) on the field of battle. Chapter 15 identifies two types of quan that are operative in warfare: the superior knowledge of the commander and the superior training of the troops. We translate this concept as “heft.”
A term closely related to quan is shi .5 In both pre-Han military texts and the Huainanzi, shi denotes the total combat effectiveness (actual or potential) of a unit, deployment, or invested position. This measure is determined by both the intrinsic and extrinsic factors affecting the military formation in question at any given time. Thus, all things being equal, ten highly trained archers have more shi than do ten poorly trained ones, but if the former are placed in a valley and the latter are deployed on a hilltop, the differential in shi might be reversed. Because the calculation of shi combines intrinsic and extrinsic factors in this way, we distinguish it from quan by translating it as “force” in chapter 15.6 In keeping with its roots in the military literature of the Warring States, “force” is the cornerstone of the tactical and strategic philosophy of chapter 15. It is adduced as the single indispensable factor on which the final outcome of conflict depends, vastly more determinative than the relative moral qualities of matched combatants or the intercession of supernatural powers. (Note that shi appears in other chapters of the Huainanzi with other meanings and connotations and that a common translation of the term in other contexts is �
��positional advantage.”)
* * *
Many of the historical anecdotes recounted in the Huainanzi involved rivalries and conflicts among the major states of the Warring States period, whose approximate locations around 400 B.C.E. are shown. The state of Wu had been conquered by Yue in 473 B.C.E., and the once-powerful state of Jin had fragmented into the states of Hann, Wei, and Zhao in 403 B.C.E. The territory of the Yi peoples in southern Shandong was not recognized as a state by the Sinitic polities of the central plains. (Map by Sara Hodges, with data from the China Historical Geographic Information Service [CHGIS], version 4, Harvard Yenching Institute, Cambridge, Mass., January 2007)
As indicated earlier, the perspective of chapter 15 differs in several respects from that of the earlier military literature. First, “An Overview of the Military” treats military affairs in a manner that expresses the intrinsic interests and concerns of the Huainanzi ’s eponymous patron, Liu An. The chapter addresses how the military may be used efficiently and when and under what circumstances the military may be used legitimately. Borrowing a formula from Warring States and early Han political literature, “An Overview of the Military” establishes that military force may be legitimately applied only “to sustain those who [were] perishing, [and] revive those [lineages] that had been cut off.”7
These lines were used to evoke their original context. The “perishing” and “cut off” to which they refer are not people in general but the hereditary noble houses chartered by the Zhou kings to carry on ancestral cults and exercise local authority. This Zhou model was precisely the institutional structure on which Liu An’s position as “king of Huainan” was predicated. The larger import of “An Overview of the Military” is thus clear: that military power cannot be used to centralize routine power over the entire empire, that it can be applied only in a proper spirit of deference to the hereditary privileges of the noble houses that honeycombed the Han domain (such as that of Huainan).
This assertion is not a mere moral injunction. As “An Overview of the Military” asserts at several points, the normatively correct and practically efficacious uses of the military are ultimately one and the same. Any assault directed at other than a “kingdom without the Way” will result in either defeat or, through the cosmic processes described in chapter 6, calamity rebounding on the state and person of the victorious aggressor. In this respect, the Huainanzi agrees with the Jing fa (Constant Standard), the first of five texts appended to the Laozi B manuscript discovered at Mawangdui. That text declares that “if your achievement [that is, your conquest] is complete and you do not stop, your person will be endangered and suffer calamity.”8 The Huainanzi extends this principle to a further extreme. Chapter 15 closes with a detailed description of purifying rituals that must be performed by both the ruler and the commander of a victorious army in order to avoid calamity, even if they took care not to transgress cosmic limits.
Another theme of chapter 15 that distinguishes it from earlier military texts like the Sunzi centers on its discussion of the commander. Like the latter text, “An Overview of the Military” celebrates knowledge and skill as definitive capacities of the victorious commander. These qualities are not enough, however. Consistent with the perspective of the rest of the Huainanzi, chapter 15 asserts that knowledge and skill must be wedded to a potency that is rooted more deeply than rational thought. Only a commander who has come to embody the Way and its Potency through mystical self-cultivation will be completely unfathomable to his enemies and perfectly effective in responding to the constantly changing conditions of the battlefield:
[H]e sets his mind in the Field of Profound Mystery
and lodges his will in the Spring of the Nine Returns. (15.17)
Sources
“An Overview of the Military” is one of the most derivative chapters of a highly synthetic text, its structure drawing heavily from the classical military writings, especially the Sunzi bingfa,9 inherited by Han literati from the Warring States.10 For example, the lines
Thus,
a complete soldier is first victorious and only then seeks battle;
a defeated soldier gives battle first and only then seeks victory. (15.9)
are quoted almost verbatim from the Sunzi.11 And whereas chapter 15 declares,
[T]he force of one who is skilled at using arms is
like releasing amassed water from a thousand-ren [-high] dike,
like rolling round stones into a ten-thousand-zhang [-deep] gorge (15.18)
the Sunzi asserts, “One who is victorious [leads] the people into battle like releasing amassed water into a thousand-ren [-deep] gorge”12 and elsewhere states, “The force of one who is skilled at battle is like rolling round stones down a thousand ren [-high] mountain.”13
Warring States texts like the Sunzi developed a novel view of military affairs that contrasted with the aristocratic warrior ethos of the Bronze Age. Whereas the latter stressed personal courage, chivalric honor, and public displays of martial prowess, the new literature represented the military as a pragmatic implement of state power unrelated to qualities of valor, the use of which necessitated the application of skill, cunning, and deception. The aristocratic commander had been expected to be a martial hero, but the new Warring States commander was expected to be a sagacious and coldly calculating strategist.14 By the time of the Han Empire, this novel Warring States perspective on military affairs had become the hegemonic view and the basic template informing the state’s ongoing practices of military recruitment and organization. In echoing texts like the Sunzi, the Huainanzi is thus acknowledging the received and broadly accepted wisdom.
The Huainanzi’s discussion of military affairs is not, however, entirely constrained by the new “professionalism” of the Sunzi and its ilk. Chapter 15 presents a unique synthesis of ideas. Those regarding tactics, strategy, and the art of command correspond most closely to that of the Warring States military texts. But as suggested earlier, these ideas are framed in a larger discussion of the purposes and ethics of military power based on Confucian canonical texts, especially the Spring and Autumn Annals and its commentaries, and Daoist texts such as the silk manuscript texts appended to the Laozi B text discovered in Mawangdui Tomb 3.
The Chapter in the Context of the Huainanzi as a Whole
“An Overview of the Military” serves several purposes in the overall structure of the text. Inasmuch as the text claims to be a comprehensive compendium of all knowledge necessary to rule, it could not fail to include some discussion of military affairs. Chapter 15’s synthesis of Warring States military literature is thus partly an exercise in “due diligence” by the Huainanzi’s authors. In accordance with the text’s over-arching syncretic scheme, this perusal of military affairs logically comes in the late sections of the text. Elsewhere in its discussion of cosmogony and human history, the Huainanzi makes clear that warfare and weaponry were late, “devolutionary” developments in the evolution of both the cosmos and human society. They thus represent instruments of state power that are of lower efficacy and priority and are placed toward the back of the text, after more fundamental realms of concern like cosmology, personal cultivation, and even ritual. This late positioning of “An Overview of the Military” is somewhat misleading, however. Because military force and military organization are the organs of state power most closely associated with the routinization and centralization of political authority that threatened the very survival of the court of Huainan, chapter 15 provides a platform on which the authors and patron of the Huainanzi defended their own political priorities and interests.
Andrew Meyer
1. See, for example, Ames 1994, 70, “Summary of Military Strategies”; and Csikszentmihalyi 2004, 89, “Military Strategies.”
2. Han shu 30, 1701.
3. For a discussion of these terms in the history of the military literature, see Ralph D. Sawyer, Sun Tzu: The Art of War (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1993), 147–50.
4. The Sunzi bingfa discusses t
he “extraordinary” and the “usual” in 5/4/11–16, and the Weiliaozi in 18/30/7–8. The Wuzi advises “executing the extraordinary” to achieve victory in 5/43/13.
5. Both quan and shi are discussed at length in Victor Mair, The Art of War: Sun Zi ’s Military Methods (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), and Soldierly Methods: Vade Mecum for an Iconoclastic Translation of Sun Zi bingfa, Sino-Platonic Papers, no. 178 (Philadelphia: Department of Asian Languages and Civilizations, University of Pennsylvania, 2008).
6. Shi is a concept that ultimately migrated into the political literature of the Warring States, where it denoted the forms of power or advantage that accrued to civil officials by virtue of their position or circumstances. The Huainanzi also uses this term with this meaning in other chapters, and in those places we have opted for translations better suited to the particular context.
7. The phrase “sustain those that are perishing, [and] revive those [lineages] that had been cut off” appears in many Warring States texts, including the Guanzi, Xunzi, and Lüshi chunqiu. It originally denoted the definitive virtuous merit of a hegemon, a leader who used military power to moral rather than coercive ends. By the Han period, this phrase had become associated with the Confucian exegetical tradition of the Spring and Autumn Annals and is used in the Chunqiu Guliang zhuan, Duke Xi, year 17, to describe the merit of Duke Huan of Qi.
8. Mawangdui Hanmu boshu zhengli xiaozu, Mawangdui Hanmu boshu (Beijing: Wenwu, 1980), 45.
9. For a complete translation of all the extant military texts of the early period, see Ralph D. Sawyer, The Seven Military Classics of Ancient China, Including The Art of War (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1993).