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The Art of War by Sun Tzu is probably one of the most popular Chinese classical texts in the English speaking world. If you go on Amazon and type in Art of War, you get an endless list of books. The Art of War, a new translation. The Art of War, the new illustrated edition. The Art of War, the original authoritative edition. The definitive interpretation of Sun Tzu's classic book of strategy. And here is the longest title. Sun Tzu and Ma Kea Valley, leadership secrets, how to become a superior leader utilizing the principles of the Art of War and the Prince. As these titles might suggest, the Art of War probably isn't a lot of fun to read. I speak Chinese and I like to think I'm quite interested in history and classics, but still I think I need some motivation to keep cracking at it, because it was written in a very old form of Chinese, older than Shakespeare and Chaucer in the history of English literature. So it's really difficult to read and translate. I suspect not a lot of readers survived the first few chapters, even though it is a rather thin book. So when you look at so many business people and politicians who have treated about this book and probably brag about it, I doubt how many of them have actually finished it. And even if they did, how many of them really enjoyed and understood it. So here is what I do in this podcast. I'll go through the Art of War chapter by chapter, and I'll try to provide the context and a fun interpretation. I can't say I have the best analysis, but I hope to make this as pleasant a journey as I can for you and for me. Also I'm looking forward to finding out about what you think. I could say something that you don't quite agree. In that case, by all means let me know, give me your comments, send it over to crireading at gmail.com. Now before we move on to the chapters, in this episode I have something about Sunze's ideas that the translators might not tell you about, because it's hidden between the lines. First of all, don't let the title fool you. There is no art in wars, there's no beauty to be appreciated like what you're finding Christopher Nolan's movies or a Taylor Swift concert. War is a matter of life and death, Sunze said, and it doesn't matter if you wing, because you lose something anyway. A Chinese idiom says, sha dii qian zi sun ba ba. In killing a thousand of your enemies, you lose 800 of your own, that's just the kind of battlefield math Sunze was used to doing, before reinventing gunpowder, heavy machine guns and nuclear bombs. Sunze was a strategist, not a psychotic mass murderer. In his opinion, the best strategist is not he who fights a hundred battles and never loses one. Having to fight a hundred battles in itself shows the incompetence of the strategist. The best strategist though, tries to avoid wars until they are unavoidable, and they wing only the battles that matter. The best military strategy is not one that leads to the capture of the enemy base, or the desiccation of their capital city. The best strategy is one that strikes at the adversary's intentions and prevents wars from ever happening. By that standard, the heroes at the Trojan War, the crusaders who sacked Constantinople were actually losers. Now I realise it is a bit hard to understand, but these counterintuitive ideas are at the centre of Sunze's writing, and I'll go into the details in the following episodes. But if there is no art in wars, what do we make of the art of war, except that it is bad translation? Think of it as the science of war. The art of war is a rather rare example of Chinese classics covering subjects related to math, logic and natural sciences. For all we know, the other schools of Sunze's time were predominantly about rhetoric, philosophy and social governance. The well-known Confucius cared about a social hierarchy where everybody knows their place and stays in their place. The legalist master Han Fei Zi stressed law and order and their role in building an efficient economy and a wealthy state. The Taoist thinkers, Laozi and Zhuansi, delved into metaphysics and dialectics. In comparison, Sunze was much more specific and down-to-earth, as he examined different types of weather and terrain and their effects on the outcomes of war, the cost of logistics before and while battle is joined, and the dynamics of forces interacting in combat. So he was what, a weatherman, a geologist, an accountant and then what, an anthropologist? Maybe? I don't know. This attention to mundane detail is a far cry from other ancient Chinese thinkers, so we might as well translate Sunze's title as the science of war rather than the art of war. And this science of war, even though it was written long before we had intercontinental ballistic missiles, newspapers and Facebook, can be applied to our everyday life. Say you own a thriving business in town and would like to expand to a neighbouring city. How do you proceed? Let's say you'd like to propose to your girlfriend. How do you know she'll say yes? And don't forget about office politics. If you want to beat Jack on your way up the corporate ladder, what do you need to do? To be sure, the art of war is not a book of petty trickeries. It inspires you to do the right things at the right moment, rather than sabotage your opponent every step of the way. So if you are looking for untold secrets in the business of manipulation and deception, the art of war probably isn't the book you should be looking for. But if you want to develop a way of thinking that boosts your odds at whatever you pursue, knowing a little bit about the art of war would help you go a long way. So this is a brief introduction of the art of war podcast series, and I look forward to learning more about it and sharing with you in the following episodes.