Week 16: The Tao Te Ching and the Art of War
We take another quick flight from Western literature to head back to China for two influential books, Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching and Sun Tzu’s Art of War. I last read Chinese philosophy back in Week 4 with Confucius’ Analects. If you look back, I didn’t love that week for a few reasons. Having since read a a few more “aphorism” style books, I changed up my approach this week to see if I could improve my experience. Did it? First, a quick background on these two books.
After reaching around 500 A.D. last week with Boethius, we turn back the clock a lot, way back to around 500 B.C. for the Tao Te Ching and 400 B.C for the Art of War. That places them roughly in the same period not only as Confucius but also Plato. Tao is “the Way,” a guide to living and governing. The Art of War—that’s pretty self-explanatory. It’s a strategy-and-tactics primer for battle.
Both books are aphorism-driven, short sections or even one sentence that doesn’t necessarily form a narrative with adjacent sections. Art is based on broad categories (like “Energy” or “Terrain”) but still is written in statements that are numbered in my translation. If you’ve read some of my other posts, you might have seen that this is my least favorite kind of reading. Knowing that, I tried a new approach with these two books. I just split each book into five parts and read one part of each book each day, interleaving them. It didn’t make the reading that much easier, but it did help me to compare them. First, though, I’ll take each book individually.
The Tao Te Ching is an examination of the ideal approach to life, known as the Tao or Way. I think the best explanation of the Way is to live life as a leaf floating down a stream, taking life as it comes, having no desire to control, no expectations of outcome. In that willingness to be the leaf, you influence others. I think the overarching “mood” is one of peacefulness and detachment. Here are a few of my take-aways:
Realize the relationship (and the difference) between what you can see (like the walls of a house being built) and what you are really concerned about (in this case, the space that the walls create for a family to live inside). Understand the importance of the latter vs. the former. I suppose this might be seen as encouragement to not “sweat the small stuff, and it’s all small stuff.” But I think that misses the mark of the Tao. It’s more that the markers of a goal are not the goal itself.
The very best leaders are ignored. As you move down the scale to the worst leaders, you move through beloved leaders, feared ones, and despised leaders. The Tao is very into a “hands-off” approach. I don’t honestly know many people who are capable of being leaders and who also want to be ignored.
Again with that hands-off approach, the Tao asserts that rules and prohibitions entice people to vice, and weapons entice people to war. That seems to be true to a degree; I probably don’t need to talk about the possibility that the military-industrial complex has an interest in encouraging perpetual low-level fighting. But I find that this idea, on a personal level, seems to ignore or maybe even lacks entirely an idea of sin or a natural inclination to evil in man’s heart.
The Tao holds that “[r]ather than advance an inch, better to retreat a yard.” This is a really tough idea to get my hands around. Utter passivity in the face of evil or actual harm to a person or group would seem to lead to destruction. I’m sure that coordinated passivity (like Gandhi’s or MLK’s peace movements) take some ideas from this but I’m not sure it’s always a winning strategy. I’m not sure Sun Tzu would agree, either. More on that in a minute.
“When nothing is done, nothing is left undone” is also a heck of a way to live a life.
Now I’ll turn to Sun Tzu and the Art of War. Sun was apparently a military tactician who went to some pretty extreme lengths to convince the king of the superiority of his ideas. After coming to the attention of King Ho Lu, Sun divided the king’s concubines into two units to demonstrate his techniques. After beheading BOTH of King Ho Lu’s favorite concubines, the king was convinced, and Sun Tzu’s methods were put into place. Wow. Sun’s ideas are clear, completely unclouded by sentimentality or desire. It is ruthless. A few other takeaways:
All warfare is deception. It’s preferable never to fight at all, but victory with or without fighting is the most important thing. Protracted wars are terrible for both sides, and inhumane for your own country. It’s best to take the enemy whole, and that means taking him quickly.
Security against defeat is not the same thing as ability to defeat the enemy. You must have defensive measures but that only means you will not be defeated. Defensive measures will never, never lead to defeat of the enemy. Victory is always your goal, with war if necessary.
Put your own soldiers into very tough spots on the battlefield. They will always fight harder for you in those positions. Always leave the enemy a way out. It will keep them from fighting their hardest. Study the mood of the opposing troops as well as their maneuvers to know how to strike.
I wonder what the status of these soldiers was. Were they slaves or free? My thoughts immediately went to the conversation that Herodotus recorded between Demaratos and Xerxes, where the Spartan points out to the Persian ruler that free men (those ruled by law and not only a king, not only enslaved) would always fight harder than slaves. Xerxes scoffed, but Demaratos pointed out that Xerxes had no experience with free men soldiers. I would love to know what Sun Tzu would have thought about that.
There are five faults a general might have: cowardice, recklessness, a bad temper, a thin skin, and excessive tender-heartedness. Know yourself, general. If possible, know these things about your enemy, too, because then you will know the weaknesses of his men.
Finally, avoid all the fighting if you can by using spies. They are cheaper, both in money and in wear and tear on your country, and that’s just humane. The wisest rulers know this and use spies liberally, “for every kind of business.”
I think placing these two books together was intentional on Ted’s part. It’s easy to think of one as “peace time” and the other as “war,” but it goes deeper than that. Many times the texts seemed to contradict one another, especially when Sun preached that a right-thinking general could shape the battle to his will. But was he really saying that? Maybe it was more to set the battle up so that the outcome would become inevitable. I need to reflect on that a little more (although these week-long schedules don’t allow for much reflection!). But even that “setting things up” seems seriously opposed to what the Tao lays out as the ideal.
As you can tell, I wrestled with these concepts, especially the Tao. Thinking back to other texts I’ve read in this program, the Tao seems like a “floating above” as opposed to the emptying of self that the Dhammapada preaches. At first blush they can seem similar, but the goal of the Dhammapada seems to be to empty yourself in order to join with something bigger. I didn’t really get that sense of connection in the Tao. It honestly feels lonely, even more bleak to me than Stoicism. I did note a couple of passages that sounded like they had been lifted from Marcus Aurelius, as a matter of fact. It certainly did to feel at all like the Christian-informed occasional Stoicism I saw from Boethius last week.
While I found it interesting that Sun took into account the relationship between soldiers and officers, it often felt ruthless and less human than even Suetonius’ Caesars. I would love to have had a commentary on actual battles, something akin to Herodotus’ accounts of Persia and Greece.
I also realized while reading this week that Chinese literature seems to lack any kind of narrative epic, bildungsroman, tragedies, anything other than these philosophy-style books. On the one hand, I wonder if we just don’t have them. Were they lost? Plenty of Greek works have been. But there’s simply no evidence that anything like this might have existed.
It’s interesting that all these principles were told, and none were ever shown; it makes me wonder about the approach to the individual in this society. Over and over in the Western canon we have stories of leaving home and coming home changed. The very oldest stories in the West showed us heroes and villains more often than it told us how to act: Joseph, Jacob, Odysseus, Gilgamesh, Telemachus are just a few from this reading course. There are hundreds more. I can’t help but think this difference is a clue to a difference in worldview between East and West.
Finally, I think back to Confucius in Week 4. Confucius was guiding us in living a moral life, and the idea of Goodness (jên) was everywhere. So, too, were the ideas that a gentlemen occupied himself with ideas of morality, while the common man worried about work with his hands. I didn’t see any of those concepts in the readings this week at all. That’s a surprise because they were all written in roughly the same time period. I may go back and try to find out why that is. On the other hand, I do love my stories and I already miss Ovid.
Now, a note about my editions and some thoughts there. I read Stephen Miller’s edition of the Tao Te Ching. I didn’t realize until about halfway through that this is the same Miller who authored my Gilgamesh text. That seemed suspiciously multilingual to me; in fact, he writes his versions working off of multiple older translations, and then “modernizing” them. He spent 14 years studying Zen Buddhism so I imagine he feels some connection to the Tao. Frankly, I found his modernizations distracting, in particular rendering “the Master” as “she” in at least half of the passages. Thee were a couple of instances where it seemed he had a point he wanted to make so he tortured the lines into submission, as well. (Stanza 80 was a standout there.) To his credit, he did endnote those. My translation of Sun was an older one—and I chose to read the version without notes. This isn’t a text I feel likely to revisit.
That said, I can certainly see the value of Sun, especially, if you are studying military strategy. Paired with Herodotus and Macchievelli, for example, it could be especially enlightening. Of course war is a great metaphor for business, too, and there seem to be plenty of business books that are based on the Art of War. In fact, a great B-school project could be to consider one chapter’s concepts and how they parallel an aspect of a business event.
Steven Pressfield wrote a terrific book a few years back, The War of Art. His discussion of Resistance (note the capital R!) is something every somewhat creative person should be familiar with. Now that I’ve read the original, I may go back and read Pressfield’s again.
Finally, one last note about reading these aphorism-style books. One of my goals in taking this course on was increasing my attention span. This type of book isn’t helping! For that matter, neither is reading one or two chapters out of a book and then moving on to something else. For real attention span improvement, I need to read longer works that have a sustained topic. (Next week should be fun.)
Whew! Now on to this week’s music: three albums each from the Beatles and The Rolling Stones. I was genuinely surprised to find out how much I enjoyed the Stones, especially when contrasted with the Beatles! I honestly found the Beatles to be a little gimmicky and occasionally almost impossible to listen to. They felt—if not fake, at least highly produced, like set pieces. The Rolling Stones? WOW. I wanted to turn every album up to eleven. Raw, gritty, honest and accessible. This is real music for real life. No computers, no tricks. Just lots of blues-influenced Rock and Roll, fueled (I’m sure) by lots of booze, drugs and sex. Funny how good it was to listen to.
After all of that, I didn’t get to the art! Chinese architecture will remain a void in my knowledge.
Next week we are back to narrative, Rome, and the very funny (so I hear) Golden Ass from Apuleius. We hit ragtime with Scott Joplin in music, and we’ll take a look at Vincent van Gogh’s art. This project is nothing if not eclectic. As always, my exact copies are found here, and here is Ted Gioia’s Immersive Humanities Course.
So, have you read it? What do you think? After all of my thinking about this I welcome what other opinions!
By the way, did you see my post announcing my new podcast? Episode Two—the Odyssey!—comes out Tuesday. See you then!