Comparing: Hidden Dangers
The Art of War 9:3.1-13 Danger can hide on your army’s flank.
This post continues our project explaining each stanza of Sun Tzu’s work. The English translation and Chinese transliterations are from my award-winning work, The Art of War and The Ancient Chinese Revealed. Basic translations are written from the narrow perspective of opposing armies. These articles focus on the more general application of this philosophy to all competition. Start here for the book’s opening lines.
The hidden dangers explained in this article are from the third and final stanza of Section Three of Chapter 9 of The Art of War. This chapter is entitled Armed March. Its general topic is making competitive moves that advance our positions. It is one of the longest and most detailed chapters of the book.
The Four Types of Terrain
This last stanza describes hidden dangers waiting to sideswipe us on the four different types of terrain: level fields, water, marshes, and mountains. These hidden dangers arise from what obscures our vision on these terrains. In modern terms, this is how different types of competitive arenas tend to obscure certain categories of problems.
In the lines below, we summarize the Chinese characters in their original order, each with a single English word shown in < > brackets. This transliteration of the Chinese is followed by an English sentence translation.
The main danger discussed in these lines isn’t named specifically. It is the danger of “ambush,” or, more generally, being blindsided by something we couldn’t see coming. On level playing fields, we tend to have the best visibility, but even on this type of terrain, we can miss hidden danger.
<Army> <side> <have> <danger> <block>
Danger can hide on your army’s flank.
The “side” is our blindside, that place that we are not looking as we move forward. When we are moving toward a goal, we focus on our path forward and the obstacles blocking that path. In doing so, we can miss other threats that may be lingering in the shadows at our sides, threats that are very close at hand.
Every different form of competitive terrain has different obstacles that block us, not from moving forward, but from seeing a threat that is coming from the side. All people and organizations are susceptible to these dangers because we all depend upon aspects of our environment that we normally take for granted.
<Reservoir> <well>
There are reservoirs and lakes.
We can see over the top of reservoirs and lakes, so we have the illusion of visibility. But we see only the surface. Anything can be hiding below what we see. Water is Sun Tzu’s symbol for change, but a <well> is contained so we think of its ability to move as controlled. This is too an illusion. Water is always moving. Its movement are its hidden currents below the surface. Below its surface, there may even be a Loch Ness Monster or two.
Areas of new technology are a common form of reservoir in our era. On its surface, it is always tranquil, always promising beneficial change. Its dangers are hidden below. Those that dive in are more likely to encounter its rocks in a painful way than those who wade in carefully.
<Reed> <bulrush>
There are reeds and thickets.
These <reeds> are what grows in swamps and what hides the dangers in these marshes. (“Swamp thing, you make my heart sing. You make everything, groovy.”) Swamps are marshy, uncertain terrain, mixture of solid and liquid and everything in between. Over time, many “lakes” of new technology have a tendency to degenerate into swamps. Does this make them safer or more dangerous?
When we are focused on our goals, we tend to think of these reed and bulrushes as simple obstacles, but pushing past these obstacles is dangerous. We do not know what lies behind them. The ground may be solid on this side, but, on the other side, it may be a deep well or a dangerous quicksand.
<Mountain> <woods>
There are mountain woods.
Mountains are the tilted ground of hierarchical organizations. They tend to grow forests, that is, the dense thickets of bureaucracy. No matter how high we rise in an organization, we can always be blindsided by these low people in high places. These bureaucratic trees can grow to heights of their own. A person standing on the same ground as a bureaucrat in a hierarchy must often concede to the bureaucrat because he has grown too tall to challenge. It may not be right, but that is the way that hierarchies work.
We should note that the bureaucratic trees that grow in mountain forests are not good trees that bear fruit. They are trees that compete with the ones who do produce fruit.
Being Cautious About the Hidden
<Screen> <dense> <vegetation> <is>
Their dense vegetation provides a hiding place.
Life is comparison. Life is competition. Competition is comparison. “Dense” vegetation is the kind that grows best in the type of environment in which we are located. This is vegetation so it is immobile. It is not our fellow competitors who are also constantly trying to improve their position. These are those aspects of an environment that are “fixed” in the sense of rooted in place.
We don’t have to worry about these features of the environment moving, but we do have to worry about the dangers they might be hiding. They are a <screen> as well as an obstacle.
<Must> <caution> <overturn> <exact> <it>
You must cautiously search through them.
These fixed obstacles can be moved, but we must do this cautiously. Our concern is not the screen itself, but what they may be hiding. To tear down a hiding place, we need enough resources not only to tear down the obstruction, but to deal with any dangers that we may discover behind it.
Passing these danger by it more dangerous that searching them out. If we pass them by, they can attack us from the rear, where we are the least prepared to deal with them.
<Here> <hide> <seduce> <of> <place> <also>
They can always hide an ambush.
These hiding places can seduce us into being ambushed. The fact that they look safe because they stay where they are is misleading. Whatever may lie behind them may be capable of attack.
These screens may hide obvious dangers, but they can also hide more seductive forms of danger, those that look appealing but are a trap. Quicksand looks like solid ground, but it isn’t.