We cannot understand the original text of The Art of War without understanding its underlying cultural context. In Sun Tzu's own era, even our English title of the work, borrowed from a book on the military by Machiavelli, would have been considered inapproapriate.
No book written in the conceptual ancient Chinese can be completely translated into English prose sentences. The original Chinese has more in common with mathematical formulas than English sentences. Like formulas, they have various meanings in different contexts. English translations of these formulas are like describing the meaning of E=mc2 in a single sentence. It can be done, but it misses much more than it captures.
Much of Sun Tzu's system is based on choosing the conditions under which we meet our opponents. The term that we translate as "battle" from Chinese means "a meeting." It is not the same concept as "conflict," which is another Chinese character (and the worst case outcome of any meeting). Too often, we prepare for meetings with opponents thinking only in terms of conflict and, since that is what both side prepare for, it is too often the result. We are about to see the first meeting of the presidential race.
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We cannot understand the original text of The Art of War without understanding its underlying cultural context. In Sun Tzu's own era, even our English title of the work, borrowed from a book on the military by Machiavelli, would have been considered inapproapriate.