Though according to my estimate the soldiers of Yüeh exceed our own in number, that shall advantage them nothing in the matter of victory. I say then that victory can be achieved.
The other is in [XI. § 30]:—
Asked if an army can be made to imitate the shuai-jan, I should answer, Yes. For the men of Wu and the men of Yüeh are enemies; yet if they are crossing a river in the same boat and are caught by a storm, they will come to each other’s assistance just as the left hand helps the right.
These two paragraphs are extremely valuable as evidence of the date of composition. They assign the work to the period of the struggle between Wu and Yüeh. So much has been observed by Pi I-hsün. But what has hitherto escaped notice is that they also seriously impair the credibility of Ssŭ-ma Ch‘ien’s narrative. As we have seen above, the first positive date given in connection with Sun Wu is 512 B.C. He is then spoken of as a general, acting as confidential adviser to Ho Lu, so that his alleged introduction to that monarch had already taken place, and of course the 13 chapters must have been written earlier still. But at that time, and for several years after, down to the capture of Ying in 506, 楚 Ch‘u, and not Yüeh, was the great hereditary enemy of Wu. The two states, Ch‘u and Wu, had been constantly at war for over half a century,[[74]] whereas the first war between Wu and Yüeh was waged only in 510,[[75]] and even then was no more than a short interlude sandwiched in the midst of the fierce struggle with Ch‘u. Now Ch‘u is not mentioned in the 13 chapters at all. The natural inference is that they were written at a time when Yüeh had become the prime antagonist of Wu, that is, after Ch‘u had suffered the great humiliation of 506. At this point, a table of dates may be found useful.
| B.C. | |
|---|---|
| 514 | Accession of Ho Lu. |
| 512 | Ho Lu attacks Ch‘u, but is dissuaded from entering 郢 Ying, the capital. Shih Chi mentions Sun Wu as general. |
| 511 | Another attack on Ch‘u. |
| 510 | Wu makes a successful attack on Yüeh. This is the first war between the two states. |
| 509 or 508 | Ch‘u invades Wu, but is signally defeated at 豫章 Yü-chang. |
| 506 | Ho Lu attacks Ch‘u with the aid of T‘ang and Ts‘ai. Decisive battle of 柏舉 Po-chü, and capture of Ying. Last mention of Sun Wu in Shih Chi. |
| 505 | Yüeh makes a raid on Wu in the absence of its army. Wu is beaten by Ch‘in and evacuates Ying. |
| 504 | Ho Lu sends 夫差 Fu Ch‘ai to attack Ch‘u. |
| 497 | 勾踐 Kou Chien becomes King of Yüeh. |
| 496 | Wu attacks Yüeh, but is defeated by Kou Chien at 檇李 Tsui-li. Ho Lu is killed. |
| 494 | Fu Ch‘ai defeats Kou Chien in the great battle of 夫椒 Fu-chiao, and enters the capital of Yüeh. |
| 485 or 484 | Kou Chien renders homage to Wu. Death of Wu Tzŭ-hsü. |
| 482 | Kou Chien invades Wu in the absence of Fu Ch‘ai. |
| 478 to 476 | Further attacks by Yüeh on Wu. |
| 475 | Kou Chien lays siege to the capital of Wu. |
| 473 | Final defeat and extinction of Wu. |
The sentence quoted above from [VI. § 21] hardly strikes me as one that could have been written in the full flush of victory. It seems rather to imply that, for the moment at least, the tide had turned against Wu, and that she was getting the worst of the struggle. Hence we may conclude that our treatise was not in existence in 505, before which date Yüeh does not appear to have scored any notable success against Wu. Ho Lu died in 496, so that if the book was written for him, it must have been during the period 505–496, when there was a lull in the hostilities, Wu having presumably been exhausted by its supreme effort against Ch‘u. On the other hand, if we choose to disregard the tradition connecting Sun Wu’s name with Ho Lu, it might equally well have seen the light between 496 and 494, or possibly in the period 482–473, when Yüeh was once again becoming a very serious menace.[[76]] We may feel fairly certain that the author, whoever he may have been, was not a man of any great eminence in his own day. On this point the negative testimony of the Tso Chuan far outweighs any shred of authority still attaching to the Shih Chi, if once its other facts are discredited. Sun Hsing-yen, however, makes a feeble attempt to explain the omission of his name from the great commentary. It was Wu Tzŭ-hsü, he says, who got all the credit of Sun Wu’s exploits, because the latter (being an alien) was not rewarded with an office in the State.[[77]]
How then did the Sun Tzŭ legend originate? It may be that the growing celebrity of the book imparted by degrees a kind of factitious renown to its author. It was felt to be only right and proper that one so well versed in the science of war should have solid achievements to his credit as well. Now the capture of Ying was undoubtedly the greatest feat of arms in Ho Lu’s reign; it made a deep and lasting impression on all the surrounding states, and raised Wu to the short-lived zenith of her power. Hence, what more natural, as time went on, than that the acknowledged master of strategy, Sun Wu, should be popularly identified with that campaign, at first perhaps only in the sense that his brain conceived and planned it; afterwards, that it was actually carried out by him in conjunction with Wu Yüan,[[78]] Po P‘ei and Fu Kai?
It is obvious that any attempt to reconstruct even the outline of Sun Tzŭ’s life must be based almost wholly on conjecture. With this necessary proviso, I should say that he probably entered the service of Wu about the time of Ho Lu’s accession, and gathered experience, though only in the capacity of a subordinate officer, during the intense military activity which marked the first half of that prince’s reign.[[79]] If he rose to be a general at all, he certainly was never on an equal footing with the three above mentioned. He was doubtless present at the investment and occupation of Ying, and witnessed Wu’s sudden collapse in the following year. Yüeh’s attack at this critical juncture, when her rival was embarrassed on every side, seems to have convinced him that this upstart kingdom was the great enemy against whom every effort would henceforth have to be directed. Sun Wu was thus a well-seasoned warrior when he sat down to write his famous book, which according to my reckoning must have appeared towards the end, rather than the beginning, of Ho Lu’s reign. The story of the women may possibly have grown out of some real incident occurring about the same time. As we hear no more of Sun Wu after this from any source, he is hardly likely to have survived his patron or to have taken part in the death-struggle with Yüeh, which began with the disaster at Tsui-li.
If these inferences are approximately correct, there is a certain irony in the fate which decreed that China’s most illustrious man of peace should be contemporary with her greatest writer on war.