Comparing: Defending the Empty Self

The Art of War 6:3.13-17

This article continues our project explaining each line 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.

Whenever a decision must be made, the alternatives are compared to one another. Without competing alternatives there is no free choice, no choice at all. Competition is the basis of freedom. These key comparisons are made in our minds. We hold positions in the minds of those who support us, oppose us, and who must make decisions about us. Our positions compete against those of others. We advance our positions in life by advancing our positions in the minds of those who make decisions about us.

The lessons at the end of the third Section of Chapter 6 of The Art of War are about how we use the “empty self” to defend our newly established positions. This chapter is about “weakness” and “strength,” which Sun Tzu describes as “emptiness” and “fullness.” The “empty self” is the ultimate in weakness, but it has its advantages when entering, advancing, and establishing ourselves in a new environment. These lines discussed in this article are about defending the “empty self.”

Avoiding Comparison

While we must be compared to others when we want to establish a position, there are many times when we want to avoid certain comparisons. We cannot pick the right comparisons unless we are able to avoid the wrong ones. We must pick our battles if we are to succeed.

• (In the quotations below, we summarize each Chinese character as a single English word shown in < > brackets. A sentence from my English translation follows.)

<I> <no> <desire> <battle>
Avoid the battles that you don’t want.

Sun Tzu calls the situations in which we are compared to others “battles.” Beginnings are delicate times. This is especially true when we begin to establish a position in a new area. We move in small steps. We establish ourselves by serving others. However, everyone else in our environment has a stronger position than we do. We must avoid having many aspects of our positions compared with theirs. Most importantly, we must never try to tear down the positions of others. That is inviting disaster.

Since positions exist in our minds, a new person is an unknown. Even if we are not consciously using the “empty self” as a strategy, we are “empty” from the perspective of those around us because they do not know what is inside of us.

While normally, we do not want to be invisible and ignored. In these newly established positions, it is safer to have more people ignore us. We want to pick and choose those on whom we make an impression. Being invisible to most is not a bad thing in terms of defending ourselves.

<Divide> <ground> <and> <yet> <defend> <is>
You can divide the ground and yet defend it.

We must be especially careful about taking sides in any arguments going on around us. We must learn the different sides and how to defend them but not draw lines separating us from others. Only when we learn our environment, do we begin to understand who controls what type of ground within it. We want to prevent others from seeing our new position as a threat to anyone’s ground. This means that we describe our responsibilities in different ways to different people. We want to describe the ground we have been given in a way that is helpful to them.

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