Comparing: Positions and Water

The Art of War 7:7.1-15 Take a position where you can triumph using superior numbers.

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.

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This article examines the first seven lines of Section Eight of Chapter 6 of The Art of War. The general topic of this chapter is emptiness and fullness and how weakness and strength flow from them. In this first section of the chapter, Sun Tzu starts by providing a valuable analogy to help us think about competitive situations: the behavior of water. Positions are fluid not solid, just like they are not a specific point, but a path. We succeed in competition by modeling our strategic decisions after what we see water doing naturally.

This lesson appears to contradict one of the basic rules of military strategy: always fight from the high ground. Water does not seek the high ground but the low. Which advice is correct? Both. The choice of high ground, however, is determined by an even more general rule. I will explain that rule when we come to the key parts of this verse.

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

<Husband> <war> <form> <image> <water>
Manage your military position like water.

Notice that the text says that our competitive position, our <form>, should be the <image> of water. Water is an analogy, an image, and our competitive positions are also images. They are the image others hold in their minds of where we rank. Our images are what they compare with other images to measure us against others. We cannot know the truth about people, (not even ourselves) so we must settle by using their images. This is necessary to make choices about others: who to promote, who to fire, who to date, who to marry, and so on.

<Water> <goes> <form>
Water takes every shape.

Water takes any shape. It does this by its very nature as a fluid. We say that it conforms to the shape of its container. Water does this by its nature. We may think this power comes from gravity, but gravity is not the force behind this ability to take different shapes. Water takes the shape of its closed containers without gravity, in free fall. This ability come from its not being a solid, not having an internal structure that stabilizes its shape without a container.

The same is true of our positions in society. They conform to the openings which we are given. However, unlike water, we have motivations: the desires of our mission. If we find the constraints of our environment too confining, we can find or make an artificial, that is, man-made way out.

<Avoid> <high> <and> <yet> <tend> <toward> <low>
It avoids the high and moves to the low.

This is gravity’s effect on water. Unlike Sun Tzu, we have equations that describe gravity’s behavior, but the cause of that force is still just as mysterious as it ever was. It is cause by something inside both the water and the highs and lows of the earth. We call that something “mass,” which is a form of energy created by the reaction of the Higgs boson on other elementary particles. Again, we have equations that describe this behavior, but we cannot explain it. If it involves a conscious choice, it is the choice of God.

This “high” and “low” are another analogy. They are an analogy for the topic of this chapter, fullness and emptiness, but they are also analogy for something else. Remember the earlier question about the lessons of high ground? That idea comes from the part of Sun Tzu’s work that discusses the four forms of competitive ground: level, titled, fluid, and soft (see this article), specifically the form of tilted ground (article here). Each of these four grounds offers a different type of competitive advantage and disadvantage. Gravity is the advantage on tilted ground. “High” is the form of the ground’s advantage and “low” is the form of its disadvantage based on gravity.

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