Reading Challenges
Translation Challenges
Chinese Scientific Knowledge
Yin
and Yang
Five Classical Elements
Sun
Tzu's Five Elements
Mapping the Elements
The Bagua (Eight Ways)
Sun Tzu's Diagrams
Cultural Barriers
We
cannot understand the original text without understanding its underlying
cultural context.
There were six schools of scientific and philosophical thought
during Sun Tzu's era:
the yinyang, Confucian, Mohist, legalist, fatalist, and Taoist schools. Sun Tzu's work was written in the context of all this work.
We refer to
the idea of yin and yang
in classical strategy as "complementary
opposites." Sun Tzu's system deals specifically with balancing competing
forces.
This balance manifests in five classical
elements.
These elements represent different stages in an ongoing process of
transformation. Sun Tzu's five elements replace the
traditional Chinese elements of wood, metal, water, fire, and earth with
mission (path), ground, climate, command, and methods.
The
Chinese developed several systems
for mapping their elements to illustrate the
key relationships among them.
Probably the best known is the Bagua.
Sun Tzu's book describes a basic arrangement of the
elements that are specialized versions of traditional mapping
methods and the Bagua.
