Chapter 68

The chapter is a short ranked list of military virtues, and every item on it is a negation. One who is good as a warrior is not warlike. One who is good in battle does not get angry. One who is good at overcoming the enemy does not engage him. One who is good at using people puts himself below them.

The four are not variations on a theme. They address different levels of a command structure: the individual fighter, the officer in an engagement, the commander deciding whether there will be an engagement, and the general who has to get work out of subordinates. At each level the recommended quality is the absence of the disposition the role is popularly associated with.

The third is the strongest claim and the most conventional in the strategic literature of the period, which also held that the best victory is the one obtained without battle. What this chapter adds is the second item, about anger, which treats a commander's temper as a technical fault. Chapter sixty-nine develops the same point by saying there is no calamity greater than taking the enemy lightly.

The fourth item leaves war altogether. Using people is an administrative activity, and putting oneself below them is the rule of chapter sixty-six restated. The chapter includes it in a military list without comment, which suggests the author saw no boundary between commanding an army and governing a state.

The closing terms are large: this is called the power of not contending, the strength of using others, and matching heaven, the highest reach of the ancients.

The phrase that closes this chapter, rendered as matching heaven or pairing with heaven, is a large claim dropped without preparation at the end of a list of military qualities, and it is worth unpacking because of the vocabulary it borrows.

To be the match of heaven was ritual language. In the state cult of the period, an ancestor could be paired with heaven in sacrifice, sharing the offering made to it, and the phrase carried a specific religious weight. The chapter applies it to a general who does not get angry and puts himself below his own subordinates.

That is characteristic of how this book handles the religious vocabulary around it. It does not reject the language and it does not use it in its own setting. Chapter thirty-two borrows the omen of sweet dew and attaches it to a ruler holding to something nameless. Chapter fifty-four borrows the ancestral sacrifices as a measure of endurance. Chapter fifty-nine puts serving heaven and governing people under a single household virtue.

In each case a term whose home is the cult is transferred to conduct, and no alternative cult is proposed to replace it. The book has no rites of its own, no priesthood, no calendar and no offerings, and this is one reason its later adoption as the founding text of an organised religion with all four is such a large development.

The chapter also calls the state it describes the highest reach of the ancients, which is the book's standard authority claim. What is being recommended is presented as recovery rather than innovation, and no ancient is ever named.