Comparing: Situational Actions

The Art of War 6:2:1-8

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.

This second Section of Chapter 6 of The Art of War lists different actions we take in different situations of emptiness and fullness. This chapter is about “weakness” and “strength,” which Sun Tzu describes as “emptiness” and “fullness.” These lines discuss various advantages that we can get from emptiness and fullness if we know how to use them both.

This section acts both as a review of past concepts and a preview of future ones. Many of these ideas are discussed in a more detailed form later in the work when describing different dimensions of competitive space, types of ground and common competitive situations. The hidden concept here is that we cannot fill one thing without emptying another.

Going and Coming

The first topic, appropriately, is how we empty and fill ground with our own actions.

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

<Exit > <this > <place > <no > <hurry >
Leave any place without haste.

When we leave a place, we are emptying a position. Sun Tzu says that advancing our positions is like climbing a ladder: we establish our selves in the next position before leaving an old one. This takes time. We can hold many positions at once, but we have to have enough resources to defend them all. For example, at work, we can try to take on more responsibilities without giving up our original ones. This has the effect of controlling more ground that can produce rewards.

<Hurry > <this > <place > <no > <intention >
Hurry to where you are unexpected.

We fill new positions as quickly as possible. We do this so that we can defend them. Defense is the final topic of this stanza. Another sense of this line is that we can move to areas even when we have no intention of staying in them. However, we must still have enough resources to defend these temporary positions.

We use temporary positions both to explore areas and to confuse others. We can discover unsuspected value in them and we find out how others might respond to our move. We often see this strategy utilized in sports. The offense can show a certain alignment only to see how the defense will react. The offense can shift to another alignment or keep the trial one if the defensive response looks like like an opportunity.

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