Sun Bin: The Art of Warfare: A Translation of the Classic Chinese Work of Philosophy and Strategy (SUNY Series in Chinese Philosophy and Culture) [Hardcover]

Sun Bin (Sun Pin) (Author), D. C. Lau (Author), Roger T. Ames (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0791454959 | ISBN-13: 978-0791454954 | Publication Date: January 2003

A classic of both military strategy and Eastern philosophy from the fourth century B.C.E.

Editorial Reviews

Language Notes

Text: English (translation)
Original Language: Chinese

From the Back Cover

Sun Bin's Art of Warfare is an essential text of Chinese military philosophy and of strategy in general. This book, lost for over two thousand years and rediscovered only in 1972, has not yet reached the prominence of Sunzi's (Sun-tzu) The Art of Warfare, which is the best-known military treatise in the world. Sun Bin's work is an indispensable companion to the work of Sunzi, who is believed to be his ancestor, but deserves to be better known in its own right, both philosophically and historically. Here, noted sinologists D. C. Lau and Roger T. Ames offer an admirably lucid translation, and provide an introduction examining the life, times, and original philosophical contributions of Sun Bin.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 253 pages
• Publisher: State University of New York Press (January 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0791454959
• ISBN-13: 978-0791454954
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.2 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #5,807,211 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Ian Myles Slater on: A Welcome New Edition, January 8, 2004

By 

Ian M. Slater "aylchanan" (Los Angeles, CA United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Sun Bin: The Art of Warfare: A Translation of the Classic Chinese Work of Philosophy and Strategy (SUNY Series in Chinese Philosophy and Culture) (Hardcover)

So far as I have been able to tell, this volume is a re-designed version of "Sun Pin: The Art of Warfare," by Lau and Ames, originally published in 1996 by Ballantine Books, and, like too many of the "Classics of Ancient China" series, allowed to go out of print.

Besides the change in the title from Wade-Giles to Pinyin transliteration (pronounced the same way), Pinyin has been used throughout (except in citing other works), and the Chinese and English sections have been rearranged to eliminate the enormous amount of blank space in the original edition. This sacrifices convenience of layout (the Chinese text originally faced the translation, with, if necessary, only a few lines on each page) for economy. The index has likewise been revised in arrangement as well as page references. If there have been other modifications, corrections, or additions to the bibliographic references, I have missed them.

There is one major omission: sixteen pages of photographs are missing (except for one, reproduced as a cover illustration). These are useful, but not essential. This was presumably in the interest of economy. Given that the previous edition is becoming more difficult to find, SUNY is to be praised for bringing the book back into print, even if this fact is somewhat obscured, and their version is slightly truncated.

For those not familiar with it already, "Sun Bin" was long thought to be a bibliographic ghost, or even a lost forgery, a supposed long-missing counterpart to the existing "Art of War" of the elder Sun (Sun-tzu). It was one of the texts described in Han Dynasty bibliographies and histories, but not reliably reported as existing for well over a thousand years. The conclusions that it probably hadn't existed, or wasn't authentic if there was such a work, had to be abandoned when substantial fragments of it, and other texts, turned up in 1972, during the excavation of early Han Dynasty tombs.

There have been several other translations into English during the last decade, but the co-authors of this volume make a distinguished combination of an eminent senior Sinologist, with a long career working with the problems of early literary texts (Lau) and a sophisticated modern interpreter of Chinese intellectual history (Ames). As a result, the reader is assured of first-rate technical scholarship, and clearly-expressed explanations.

The emphases, not unexpectedly, are on textual and linguistic problems, and the place of the text in the development of Chinese military and political theory. Of the several other translations of the fragmentary, and in part enigmatic, text which are now available, Ralph D. Sawyer's version, as "Military Methods of The Art of War," may be the most satisfactory alternative, or, better, companion volume. It is somewhat more popular in presentation, but the most important difference is Sawyer's attempt to place the text in the military (and political) history of China, as against the history of Chinese military thought.