Using This Book

To make the complexities of Sun Tzu's strategic system easier to under-stand,The Warrior Class
presents The Art of War as a unique series of les-sons. You can use this book to learn strategy
several different ways. You can simply open it randomly, letting fate guide you to a lesson. If
you want to address a specific problem, you can use the Lesson Topics on the previ-ous pages to
find the appropriate lesson. However, if you want a complete course in strategy, you can read the
book from beginning to end, building up from the simplest strategic ideas to the most complex.
No matter how you use the book, you may want to first read the follow-ing Introduction. These
first twenty-one lessons give you an overview of Sun Tzu’s strategic system. In this overview,
our lessons present a few
selected stanzas ofThe Art of War to illustrate its fundamental precepts. After the Introduction,
the book goes through the stanzas ofThe Art of War one at a time, in the same order as they
appear in the original text to preserve the way Sun Tzu logically develops his ideas through the
course of his work.
We start each lesson with a simple question about the proper strategy for success. This question
stimulates thought or discussion about the nature of competition, progress, and success. We offer
four possible answers for each question. These answers represent different schools of thought
regarding strategy. Following the question, we present a stanza from The Art of War, showing
how Sun Tzu answered this particular question. Each stanza and its lines are numbered to follow
the Clearbridge standard trans-lation format used in our other books.
After the stanza, we explain its ideas in greater depth. Since many concepts do not translate
exactly into English, we often refer to the original Chinese concepts, explaining them in more
detail. These lessons some-times go into greater detail about the various alternative answers to
the initial question, explaining why Sun Tzu would not have agreed with these approaches. Other
times, we relate the stanza to other parts of Sun Tzu's system and text to provide a larger picture
of his approach.
Each lesson is limited to one page. Certainly, much more could be said about each stanza. The
goal here is not to exhaust all possible interpreta-tions of the text but to give you a good grasp of
its basic concepts.