Chapter 31

This is the chapter that separates the book from every other piece of Warring States strategic writing, and it does it in one instruction. The killing of multitudes should be met with grief and mourning, and a victory should be conducted with funeral rites.

Nothing about that is advice on how to win. It concerns what to do afterwards, and it prescribes the ritual form: the ceremony that follows a successful campaign should be the ceremony for a death, not the ceremony for an achievement. In a culture where ritual form was the public statement of what an event meant, that is a substantive demand rather than a sentiment.

The chapter builds to it through the etiquette of position. In peace the gentleman honours the left; in war the right. The seating and standing order of a court encoded rank and auspiciousness, and the chapter observes that military occasions invert it, which is its evidence that a culture already treats war as belonging to the register of ill fortune even while pursuing it.

The middle of the chapter draws the line the whole passage turns on. Weapons may be used when they cannot be avoided, and calm restraint is best; but to find victory beautiful is to delight in killing, and a person who delights in killing will not get his way in the world. The condemned thing is not fighting and not winning. It is aesthetic pleasure taken in the result.

The last clause is characteristic. Even here, where the objection is plainly moral, the sentence given is a prediction about what will happen to such a person rather than a verdict on him.

Chapter thirty-one carries a textual problem that has been discussed for centuries, and it is the clearest example in the book of a difficulty that affects the whole text.

Parts of the chapter read less like the compressed, rhythmic and frequently rhymed material around them than like somebody explaining that material. Several passages are longer, flatter and more expository than the book's usual manner, and they gloss terms that other chapters simply use. The traditional observation is that the Wang Bi recension, which carries a running commentary, has little or no comment attached to those particular stretches, and the natural explanation offered is that they were commentary in the first place and were absorbed into the main text by a copyist who could not tell the two apart.

That explanation is an inference, not a demonstration, and it is not settled. What makes it worth knowing is the general lesson rather than the verdict on this chapter. An early Chinese text transmitted by hand copying, without punctuation and often without any visual distinction between a passage and a note on it, will accumulate material of this kind, and the eighty-one chapters as they stand are the product of that process rather than of a single act of composition.

The manuscripts recovered in the twentieth century are useful here precisely because they are older than the recensions and were copied by people with different habits. They are not a pristine original, since they too are copies with their own errors, but comparing them with the received text shows where a passage is stable and where it is not.