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A Conceptual Language
The Meaning of Characters
Sun
Tzu's Approach
Sun
Tzu's System
The Meaning of
Characters
While we start with a given set of characters making up
Sun Tzu's The Art of War, there is still a serious question about what
each of those character means, or rather, what each character meant in Sun Tzu's era. As would be expected over long periods of time, there has been
semantic drift. This means that the meaning of a specific character
naturally changes over time as spoken words do.
This drift over thousands of years is serious because
one of the more common changes is the reversal of meaning. We can see this drift
in our own era, as in the slang meaning "bad" coming closer to the
meaning of "good."
Too many translators used the modern meanings of the
characters, which depart in many ways from the concepts Sun Tzu meant when he
wrote. One of the most common errors in translating individual Chinese
characters is using modern meanings as opposed to their meanings in Sun Tzu's
era.
 We should, however,
point out that the meaning of the Chinese written language is more stable than
that of Western languages. Written English from just eight hundred years ago is
unintelligible to modern readers (read Chaucer). This may
be because of the separation between the written language
and the spoken one. Modern dictionaries are not a useful guide in
translating Sun Tzu.
However, because of the use of modern dictionaries in
translating Sun Tzu, many people think they are following Sun Tzu's advice when
in fact they are doing just the opposite of what he taught. Many of the ancient
Chinese characters have actually reversed their meaning over time. For example,
one character that once meant "order" now means "chaos." Other characters
actually mean both one thing and their opposite. For example, the ideogram for
"stay" also means "leave," depending on the context. The idea of "complementary
opposites" plays a key role, not only in Sun Tzu's The Art of War, but in
all of Chinese science and philosophy. If you read
all the popular translations, you discover that some of these reversals can
create contradictory advice. Sun Tzu says one thing according to one translator
and the opposite according to another translator.
The meaning of any set of Chinese characters comes largely from the context of
the period. However, though he wrote about the same time as Lao Tzu developed the Tao Te Ching, Sun Tzu uses many key Chinese characters very differently. For example, he
defined the key concept of tao very differently than did Lao Tzu. Lao Tzu
considered the tao the spiritual essence of natural systems, while Sun Tzu
used the term
to mean the shared mission, goals, and values that hold an organization
together. In many ways, Sun Tzu used his work to develop a specific vocabulary
for the study of competitive organizations and strategic situations.
Even the way characters were written was different in Sun Tzu's era from modern
Chinese. Chinese was originally written as detailed pictographs with a metal stylus on bamboo. During Sun Tzu's period, the
fifth century BC, different areas of
China even used different character forms. The First Emperor of Qin, who
unified China in 221 BC, introduced the Qin brush script as the official
writing, and from there on all the unified states had to use it in their affairs.
The calligraphic style of this period is the "clerical script," or lishu,
which is easily readable today, even to the uninitiated.
Today we rely upon Chinese researchers who compile Sun
Tzu's work to choose the appropriate classical characters. It should be noted,
however, that these are different than the reformed character set used in
mainland China. You can see a sample of the Chinese text (as written today) with a
transliteration and English sentence translation here.
Of course, the best method is to use Sun Tzu's
definitions for characters, which he provides in detail in his work, rather than
relying on dictionary definitions. Unfortunately, his definitions are usually too
detailed and complex, making them unworkable in simple translation.
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