Comparing: Advantage and Danger

The Art of War, Chapter 7.1.9-15 Use an indirect route as your highway.

This post continues our project explaining each stanza of Sun Tzu’s work. The English and Chinese are from my award-winning translation, The Art of War and The Ancient Chinese Revealed. Start here for the book’s opening lines.

Practical Strategy is a reader-supported publication. Become a free subscriber for free or paid subscriber for only $5,

These lines continue Section One of Chapter 7 of The Art of War. The general topic of this chapter is Armed Conflict. When we are moving to advance our positions in life, avoiding conflict becomes more difficult over time. Not only are we trying to advance, but the rest of our world is advancing as well. We must foresee where others are going and why, if we want to avoid conflict with them.

Competition is comparison. The fact that we want to be competitive, that is, improve our positions when compared to others, raises the potential of conflict. We may not want to take another person’s position, but we do want to surpass them in some way. We want others to make decisions in our favor rather than theirs.

Detours

Because of this, we have to think about indirectly seeking to advance.

• In the section below, we summarize each Chinese character with a single English word shown in < > brackets.

<Make> <detour> <this> <roadway>
Use an indirect route as your highway.

It is always best if others do not see where we are headed. In geometry, the shortest distance between two points is a straight line, but the shortest strategic distance between two positions is a detour. We may be guided over the long-run by the northern star of our mission, but, at each step of the way, we are guided by the ever changing nature of the ground.

Remember the lessons of the last chapter about comparing our positions to water. Water has firm rules about how it moves, seeking its lowest level, but those rules are written into the shape of the earth, its highs, lows, and their connections.

<And> <yet> <guide> <it> <by> <means> <of> <advantage>
Use the search for advantage to guide you.

All moves are explorations of ground shape. We cannot discover this information without exploring new areas with open minds. There a many types of ground, each of which holds its own secrets. We must be open to what the ground’s conditions offer.

Unity

When advancing, we must also understand all the different ways we keep our people together. Unity is strength. A united force is always stronger than a divided one. Unity is most important in areas where others are divided. See this article, Comparisons: Unity and Division.

The rest of this article is reserved for our paid subscribers. Become a free subscriber for weekly previews and one monthly article. To get all weekly articles become a paid subscriber. It only costs $5. You can cancel at any time.