Comparison: Moving into Conflict

The Art of War, Chapter 7.2.15-29 If you make your army travel without good supply lines, your army will die.

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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The lines discussed here are the two stanzas at the end of Section Two of Chapter 7 of The Art of War. The general topic of this chapter is Armed Conflict. The focus of these stanzas are the dangers of moving into conflict. We must move if we want to advance our positions. However, moving into empty areas to search for opportunities is very different than moving into occupied territory seeking conflict.

Competition is a comparison. What we compare are people’s positions. Positions exist in our minds. These positions rank people in various mental hierarchies. Sun Tzu’s method for competitive success is improving our positions by improving our value to others. However, more commonly, people seek to advance by tearing down the positions of rivals instead of building up their own positions.

The First Stanza

In the first stanza, Sun Tzu defines the deadly dangers of moving into destructive conflict. All moves require resources that we could use for defense. We consume those resources when moving ourselves in order to attack our rivals. Unlike productive positions that win rewards from others, the resources we use to move into conflict only consume resources.

• In the indented sections below from The Art of War, we summarize each Chinese character with a single English word shown in < > brackets. The line of Chinese characters is followed by an English sentence version.

<Correct> <cause> <army> <without> <wagon> <heavy> <then> <die>
If you make your army travel without good supply lines, your army will die.

This line further explains an earlier line in the previous article about abandoning our resources in order to move fast enough to engage a rival force in conflict. Supply wagons slow down our moves, but without these resource, we cannot survive over time.

<Without> <provisions> <food> <then> <die>
Without supplies and food, your army will die.

The most important resources for an army are food and water. Without them, soldiers cannot survive. While we may not use soldiers in modern competition, people are still the key to our success. Our resources come from the rewards that people give us. People support us because we serve their goals in some way.

<Without> <produce> <save> <then> <die>
If you don’t save the harvest, your army will die.

We receive and distribute resources, but these resources come from the productivity of our existing positions. Our existing positions exist to serve others. This is why we are rewarded for producing their benefits. These resources are not produced by the positions we move into in order to engage in destructive conflict.

The Second Stanza

In this stanza, Sun Tzu reviews many of the difficulties in moving into position so that we can attack others. Movement is necessary to advance all positions. Sun Tzu basic strategy advises movement into open areas, however, not moving our competitive forces into occupied areas to win the ground from rivals. Movement seeking conflict is very different than movement searching for openings leading to opportunities.

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