Comparing: Talk and Silence

The Art of War 6:7.5-11 Use your position as your war’s centerpiece.

This article 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 five lines of the second stanza of Section Seven 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 these complementary opposites. This first part of this stanza focusses on how we use our position to generate the strengths and weaknesses we need in a given competitive arena.

Your Competitive Position

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

<Make> <form> <war> <’s> <ridgepole>
Use your position as your war’s centerpiece.

The Chinese character that we translate as “position” is <form>. The character translated as <war> has the broader meaning of “competition.” A<ridgepole> is the lengthwise central beam holding up a roof. A roof is an inspired metaphor for a position. A position covers the ground we hold and, to some degree, protects us from the climate. This position is what others see when looking down at their mental maps of a competitive arena. As we have said before, our positions are not us. They are façades, images that we must manage.

The key word in this line is the first one <make>. It is translated as “use”. Its point is that we have to think of our competitive positions as tools. They are the central tools of good strategy. Every competitive strength and weakness we have flows from these facades. When evaluating facts, people judge them by whether or not those facts match with what they “know” about our positions. What they know is the image, not the reality.

Not Taking Positions

This brings us to a line that reviews the initial lessons in this chapter about the “empty self.”

<Arrive> <to> <without> <form>
Arrive at the battle without a formation.

There are four articles about the value of the lack of a position when entering into a new competitive arena. I call this lack of a position, the “empty self.” A position is the source of our strengths and weaknesses, but we avoid showing any particular sets of strengths and weaknesses when we are new to a competitive arena. This strategy allows us to introduce, advance, establish, and defend our non-positions more easily. There are advantages to being overlooked.

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