The Art of War: Warrior Rules - winning by comparing positions

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 Sun Tzu's 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.