Reading Challenges
Reading Challenges Overview
Not Modern Nonfiction
Not a Modern Textbook
The Specific Meanings
The Multiple Meanings
The Rigorous Meanings
The
Secrets of Sun Tzu
Not a Modern Textbook
Sun Tzu didn't write a textbook for modern audiences. In
modern textbooks, the authors include examples, illustrations, exercises, and
practice drills to help students master the ideas. Sun Tzu's work lacks all
these features.
When you start reading the Art of War, you may notice how much of the work is spent simply defining
terms. This process begins on the first page and continues on almost every
page. As we read, we cannot keep track of this multitude
of definitions. As one definition follows another, the important details of their
critical elements are easy to overlook.
Illustrations demonstrating the connections among these
ideas would be very helpful, and, surprisingly enough, his work does include
descriptions of such illustrations, but they are written in the
scientific
tradition of his era. Modern readers have no idea how this culture mapped
ideas, so we cannot make the connections that readers in his era did naturally.
As the work goes on, Sun Tzu uses his specialized vocabulary to
express very sophisticated ideas. Most of these ideas cannot be easily expressed
without that vocabulary. However, since readers do not master the fine
distinctions of that vocabulary, they cannot understand the more refined points
that are being made.
If Sun Tzu had written in modern times, he would have
explained these ideas in more detail. He would have included examples,
exercises, and practice drills to clarify his concepts.
Unfortunately, in his era, people learned from living masters, not from
books. On a practical level, writing and
duplicating books was too expensive and time-consuming to include a wealth of
examples or details. The onus was placed on the
reader to study the work rather than on the writer to explain every
idea in detail. There is a 2,500-year gap between Sun Tzu's expectations and
readers' expectations today.
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