Comparing: Slight Advantages
The Art of War 9:2.7-12 You must sometimes defend on a hill or riverbank.
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 slight advantages examined in this article are from the last two stanzas of Section Two 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.
This second section of this chapter describes different aspects of the four different types of terrain covered in the chapter’s first section. This stanza looks at slight advantages on level ground that give a competitive position some height and visibility. These stanzas are a good example of Sun Tzu getting into more and more detailed aspects of strategy as the book progresses.
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 context for this article is the terrain of level playing fields or high plateaus.
<Town> <high> <mound> <dike> <prevent>
You must sometimes defend on a hill or riverbank.
A high plateau is a level plain, but it is not empty. It may have towns, which provide walls, mounds the provide higher places, dykes that are long stretches of higher ground, and so on. These features are, in a small way, like forts, mountains, and rivers, but we must remember that the advantages of town, mounds, and dikes are small. They provide good defensive positions when nothing else is available. Their advantages are slight but meaningful, especially when no one holds a major advantage.
Towns are not forts, but they have walls for defense. Mounds are not big but they are big enough to give anyone a slight advantage of gravity. Dikes and their related bodies of water are not big, but they are big enough so they provide a stretch of higher ground and a stretch of water that acts like a moat.
Notice that towns, mounds, and dikes all offer an advantage in height. This is another form of the strategic generality that high is good and low is bad. In any other ground, even in slight advantage in height is valuable. The advantage of this height is that it gives us places from which we can survey the surrounding flat area of the plateau. They also give us places where we can be seen. These are landmarks. When we occupy them, we become a unique part of the terrain.
<Must> <position> <this> <south> <sunny> <hillside>
You must keep on the south side in the sun.
This is very like the advice for mountains, but, unlike mountains, the interesting characteristic of these defensive positions is not their cooler temperatures and its affect on our health. Here, the issue is visibility: what we can see and how we can be seen. In being compared to opponents on a level playing field, we want to be noticed, especially by those who can become our supporters. On this ground, we want visibility. Competition is comparison. One way we can advance our positions in the minds of others is to be more visible than our potential opponents.
In evaluating competitors on a level playing field, when other factors a nearly equal, people choose those who they can see the most easily. When we are defending our positions on a level playing field, we want to take positions that which get the most attention most of the time. Our ability to be seen correlates strongly to our ability to protect our positions. When we are seen, our positions become more fixed in the minds of others. Our success on a level playing field depends largely on our visibility.
<And> <yet> <right> <back> <go>
Keep the uphill slope at your right rear.
The assumption is that we want to advance. If we advance from these positions, we want to make sure that we can fall back to them. Because of their defensibility, these locations are good bases of operations for our new territory on level playing fields.
Being able to return to a position is an important advantage. Later in the book, Sun Tzu describes positions that can trap us. One way a position traps us when we cannot return to it if we leave it. These positions on a level-playing field are all stable so we can always return to them.
<Here> <army> <’s> <advantage>
This will give the advantage to your army.
When a position gives us an advantage, even a slight one, we do not want to abandon it. Even small advantages can help us win the mental comparisons that determine our positions in the minds of others.
Sun Tzu’s system is one that explores the various natural balances in nature. Here, the active balance is that of the ground against climate.
<Ground> <’s> <assistance> <also>
It will always give you a position of strength.
Unlike the climate, which is always change, the features of the ground a very stable. We can depend upon this features because they do not quickly change. The main features of ground are distance, difficulty, and openness. The ground is our source of resources and rewards. These slight rises are minor features of the Ground. They are overshadowed by the distances, difficulties, and openness of the terrain. These rises are a minor defect in openness, but they must be weighed against all the other advantages and disadvantages. The most important aspect of any ground is its ability to produce resources and rewards.
These minor advantages do not overshadow the other aspects of the ground, but they can add to them.