Sun Bin: The Art of Warfare

Sun Bins' 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. Sun Bin, advisor to King Wei of the state of Qi, worked and wrote during the mid-fourth century B.C.E. during China's Warring States period. It was a time of unprecedented violence; without a central national authority, nation-states fought fiercely amongst one another. New technologies made fighting more deadly, so that between the mid-fourth and mid-third centuries B.C.E, the number of battlefield casualties increased tenfold. Sun Bin's work is the key to understanding the physical and intellectual revolution that made such "progress" in the efficiency of warfare possible.