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  • The Art of War: Sun Zi’s Military Methods
  • Peter Lorge
The Art of War: Sun Zi’s Military Methods. Translated by Victor H. Mair. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007. ISBN 978-0-231-13382-1. Tables. Appendix. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Pp. xxxiii, 189. $19.95.

Victor Mair’s excellent new translation of Sunzi’s (Sun Tzu) Art of War is a welcome addition to the pre-existing body of translations of this text. It joins the ranks of the half dozen first-rate translations of the Sunzi, and brings a new, and extremely useful perspective to the text: that of a pure sinologist. Professor Mair is well known in the field of China studies for his philologic and linguistic work, and we are fortunate to have such a mature [End Page 927] and skilled practitioner of these arcane arts turn his attention to the foundation text of Chinese military studies. It is particularly gratifying to those of us who have labored to convince the broader field of Chinese studies of the importance of the military and military thought in Chinese culture, that a senior scholar previously associated with the fields of Buddhism and literature would not only devote so much time and energy to the Sunzi, but also find it so deeply engaging.

One can have nothing but praise for the high quality of Professor Mair’s translation, so let me turn to the other aspects of this work that make it so valuable. Professor Mair’s great strength is in treating the text of the Sunzi as a text, and fully developing and explaining the history of the work in relation to recent archaeological finds. He does not treat the text as a perfect distillation of profound military wisdom, but as a work that was created over time in a particular environment. His insistence that there was no historical person “Master Sun”, while well known and accepted by scholars, is rare among translations. Mair is very clear that the received text of the Sunzi was derived from a much broader pool of military maxims and writings, which was then provided with a “Master Sun” as putative source. His explanation of the construction of the mythical Sunzi, and why it is clearly not an historical figure, is very useful.

Mair’s linguistic discussion of the text far exceeds that of any other English language source, both in length and quality, and it should now become required reading for any scholar seriously engaging the text. Less serious readers, however, will likely find it overwhelming. It is nevertheless critically important that the Sunzi generally be understood to have evolved mostly in the latter half of the 4th century BCE, that different chapters formed at different times, and that it was the work of many hands. The truly engaged scholar will have to wait until Mair’s more extensive philological treatment, “Soldierly Methods: Introduction and Notes for an Iconoclastic Translation of Sun Zi bingfa,” becomes available in Sino-Platonic Papers 178. Ironically, given Mair’s discussion of the construction of the Sunzi as a text, the demands of contemporary publishing effectively prohibit anything but a conventional translation. His new translation is entirely conventional, and very, very good.

Peter Lorge
Vanderbilt University
Nashville, Tennessee
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