ABSTRACT
This chapter will examine some of the early modes of interpretation of the Sunzi bingfa (The Art of War of Sunzi), the most famous of the Seven Military Canons (Wujing qishu) that were established as a core group of military texts in the Yuanfeng reign period of Song Shenzong as a counterpart to the Confucian canons. 1 Shenzong was at the time attempting to reorganize the bureaucracy to enable him to achieve his lifelong goal, the recapture of territory lost to the Tangut Xixia in the northwest and to the Liao in the north and northeast, but his campaigns ended in military disaster. Ultimately the reform movement that he had sponsored through Wang Anshi (1021-1086) was discredited in the eyes of the literati and Shenzong himself died a broken man at the early age of thirty-seven in 1085. 2 Partially as a consequence of the failure of the reformers and the later ascendancy of the School of Principle (lixue), 3 the military canons never received the kind of in-depth study that the Confucian canons enjoyed in later times, and wen, the civil arts, dominated literati discourse. 4 The military canons have also suffered comparative neglect by modern scholars, especially in the West, even though the Sunzi has attracted the attention of teachers of business administration, and has been translated numerous times into many Western languages. 5 Griffith and Minford are the only translators into English who include passages from the commentators, but they do so unsystematically and without any consistent rationale, sometimes including the full comment and sometimes radically abbreviating it so that the commentator’s interpretation is quite distorted. 6
