The Commentators

The Commentators
----------------

Sun Tzu can boast an exceptionally long distinguished roll
of commentators, which would do honor to any classic. Ou-yang
Hsiu remarks on this fact, though he wrote before the tale was
complete, and rather ingeniously explains it by saying that the
artifices of war, being inexhaustible, must therefore be
susceptible of treatment in a great variety of ways.

1. TS'AO TS'AO or Ts'ao Kung, afterwards known as Wei Wu Ti
[A.D. 155-220]. There is hardly any room for doubt that the
earliest commentary on Sun Tzu actually came from the pen of this
extraordinary man, whose biography in the SAN KUO CHIH reads like
a romance. One of the greatest military geniuses that the world
has seen, and Napoleonic in the scale of his operations, he was
especially famed for the marvelous rapidity of his marches, which
has found expression in the line "Talk of Ts'ao Ts'ao, and Ts'ao
Ts'ao will appear." Ou-yang Hsiu says of him that he was a great
captain who "measured his strength against Tung Cho, Lu Pu and
the two Yuan, father and son, and vanquished them all; whereupon
he divided the Empire of Han with Wu and Shu, and made himself
king. It is recorded that whenever a council of war was held by
Wei on the eve of a far-reaching campaign, he had all his
calculations ready; those generals who made use of them did not
lose one battle in ten; those who ran counter to them in any
particular saw their armies incontinently beaten and put to
flight." Ts'ao Kung's notes on Sun Tzu, models of austere
brevity, are so thoroughly characteristic of the stern commander
known to history, that it is hard indeed to conceive of them as
the work of a mere LITTERATEUR. Sometimes, indeed, owing to
extreme compression, they are scarcely intelligible and stand no
less in need of a commentary than the text itself. [40]

2. MENG SHIH. The commentary which has come down to us
under this name is comparatively meager, and nothing about the
author is known. Even his personal name has not been recorded.
Chi T'ien-pao's edition places him after Chia Lin,and Ch'ao Kung-
wu also assigns him to the T'ang dynasty, [41] but this is a
mistake. In Sun Hsing-yen's preface, he appears as Meng Shih of
the Liang dynasty [502-557]. Others would identify him with Meng
K'ang of the 3rd century. He is named in one work as the last of
the "Five Commentators," the others being Wei Wu Ti, Tu Mu, Ch'en
Hao and Chia Lin.

3. LI CH'UAN of the 8th century was a well-known writer on
military tactics. One of his works has been in constant use down
to the present day. The T'UNG CHIH mentions "Lives of famous
generals from the Chou to the T'ang dynasty" as written by him.
[42] According to Ch'ao Kung-wu and the