Talk:Thirty-Six Stratagems

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[edit] Title

'36 Strategies'? It's clearly stated on the page that it should be 'Strategems'... —Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.141.216.161 (talk) 00:42, 14 February 2008 (UTC)

I second this. The title of the page must be changed to "Thirty-six Strategems."

[edit] Chinese characters

Is there a simplified version of each Chinese character for the 36 strategies? If not would it be okay if I added them in? —Preceding unsigned comment added by CLDragon (talk • contribs)

Sure, go ahead. --maru (talk) contribs 23:28, 5 April 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Strategie #1 tian1 translation

AFAIK, tian is also some ancient naming for Emperor.

Theres also some matching story then, shortend:

1st try to invade korea with a fleet went bad because of the weather, emperor went sea-sick.

Generals want try a 2nd attempt, but emperor denies, because of his sea-sickness the 1st time.

Generals build a 'swimming city', composed of dozens of ships tied together, and invite the emperor...

Emperor arrives, generals let the 'city' depart to korea... emperor agrees then to invade...

However, I don't know, how far this story is true, but I read it in one translation of the san xi liu ji.

  • The story above is repeated in "The Thirty-Six Strategies of Ancient China" by Stefan H. Verstappen(China Books, 1999). He says the Emperor in question was Tai Zong of the Tang Dynasty. Amusingly, the 'floating city' was supposedly passed off as a dinner party at a large estate. The Emperor found himself in Korea in the morning none the wiser.
"Decieve the Emperor to Cross the Ocean" is not significantly clearer then "Decieve the Sky to Cross the Ocean", and needs the story to make sense. The story itself is only a subtle allusion to the actual strategy, which is to give the appearance of innocence to trick the enemy into dropping his guard. Of course, one could also infer the lesson that even your allies may need to be manipulated to achieve victory.
Unlike the other stories in Verstappen's book, the story of the Floating City does not explicitly cite sources, making it less history and, perhaps, more folklore. If a possibly apocryphal story inspires an axiom like "Decieve the Emperor...", does it deserve entry as a source material?
--MikeKozar 20:22, 30 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Summary of Edits and Cleanup

I will be adopting this page of sorts and try to edit it into better form. Current plan is to reformat the page, give the origin of each proverb, and an explaination on how the proverb applies to military tactics. Vyn 00:23, 28 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Removal of "Legacy" Section

I started removing some of the inaccuracies in it and ended up deleting the entire section since there is nothing left. There is no common Chinese saying that there are only 36 strategies under the sky. (Note that there is no direct quote in Chinese.) The book attributed to Sun Tzu is not a book of tactics only; wheras the thirty-six strategies themselves are more like tactics or strategems. And the fact that there are some similarities between the thrity-six stratgies and Western books on War is hardly surprising or worth mentioning. -- Takto 15:55, 16 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Number 7

Rather than feint within feints within feints , I've always taken this one on face value, to create an incident when none exists, usually to create a Casus belli. for example the Mukden Incident and the Germans staged incidents against itself to give them the excuse of self defence when attacking Poland.Koonan the almost civilised 01:33, 3 July 2007 (UTC)

Translation of classical Chinese text is notoriously difficult since the meaning of each character depends heavily on the context in which it was used. The English translation for strategy #7 is quite misleading as a result of this, since the "something" and "nothing", despite being correct transliterations, fail to convey the intended meaning that is closer to "real" and "fake" respectively. The original text of the Thirty-Six Strategies goes into a bit of detail to explain this, and in fact gives a concrete example of what the author had in mind.
The reader is directed to consider an actual battle that occured during the An Shi Rebellion. Rebel forces had surrounded a city belonging to loyalists, and the defenders were running out of arrows. Inspired by Zhuge Liang's tactic of borrowing arrows from the enemy, the defenders dressed up straw men and lowered them down the city walls at night. The besieging army thought the defenders were attempting a sneak attack, so they shot the straw men full of arrows, which the defenders happily retrieved for their own use. The same tactic was then repeated on the ensuing night, but the attackers had caught on by then and just ignored all the figures moving up and down the city wall. Taking advantage of this indifference, an actual sneak attack was executed on the third night and it successfully routed the rebels.
With that example in mind, the current text describing this strategy as feints within feints is not entirely incorrect, although it should certainly be explained in some more detail. I would love to do so myself, but I am a bit stuck on finding a decent source to cite, which is quite important as demonstrated above. I do not have easy access to Chinese text or related works right now, and I am hesitant with using web sources of dubious origin. Literally all the online content in Chinese related to the Thirty-Six Strategies has been lifted out of someone's well written book/paper without citation, and the extent of this plagiarism was quite shocking to me - to date I have not seen a single Chinese article online explaining the Thirty-Six Strategies without quoting or paraphrasing from this unidentified work. I have been forced to cite such content (e.g. the www.cc-only.com link) just for reference sake, but I would really like to know who the original author was and give him due credit, as well as maybe locate an English translation of that particular work.
Vyn 11:25, 3 July 2007 (UTC)
On a related note, your recent addition of examples to help western readers will have to tread a careful line around WP:NOR. Granted, much of this may fall into the category of common sense, but we should aim to have good sources as a long term goal, especially when it is easy to be mislead by imperfect translations. One of the common criticisms of "ancient Chinese wisdom" is that they are so vague you could apply them to just about anything if you spent enough time rationalizing your own interpretation. I think this is something that crops up due to cultural and chronological divides, as well as translation problems, so I would like to pay some extra attention to that aspect of this article.
Vyn 11:47, 3 July 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Disputed

Sometimes I get doubts that the main author really understands the strategems.

  1. First, it is "Strategem", not "strategy". A strategy is a long-term plan. It would be very bad when your long-term scheme were to run away (strategem no. 36). "Strategem" means ruse, guile, cunning, the word "ji" can also mean "plan".
  2. Some examples for the strategems were very good and archetypal indeed - unfortunately, for absolutely different strategems than originally posted (cf. my edits).
  3. The original author seems to have misunderstood the list because of the misnomer "strategy" instead of "strategem" to be an exclusively military treatise. This is wrong; the "36 strategems" are often, in Europe, compared with Machiavelli's Principe. Instead of the Suns (Sun Wu and Sun Bin), they were not intended for the military, but a broader political spectrum.

I corrected some faults, but do not have the time to rework the article entirely. Apart from such fundamental a rework possibly raising resistance by other contributors.

Kto288: Your interpretation of "Creating something from nothing" is entirely correct. Vyn's definition is more correct for Number 20, "Trouble the water to catch the fish".

--137.193.51.82 17:18, 29 August 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Number 17

A half a brick isn't "bait" for anything I know about. How about this... By tossing the brick, they must drop the jade to catch the brick. —Preceding unsigned comment added by JoshNarins (talk • contribs) 21:31, 14 January 2008 (UTC)