You can also read the back cover blurbs by going to the Reviews and Comments page. Crucial to this new strategic vision is knowledge especially self-knowledge and a view of the whole that seeks to minimize loss for all concerned and thus render all sides victorious. This new and unusually faithful translation carefully avoids paraphrase and hews closely to the enigmatic quality of the original precisely the quality that allows us to find untold riches in its terse, almost coded lines millennia after this oral tradition was first set down. The state is the system in which we live our household, our culture or society, or our own mind. Defense ensures the integrity of our boundaries and allows life to flourish within them.
Force is the energy of concentrated action.
And victory lies in bringing others around to embracing a larger view one that includes their own without ever going to battle. About 2,300 years ago in what is now north China, a lineage of military leaders put their collective wisdom into written form for the first time. Their text was to shape the strategic thinking of all East Asia. It offered a radically new perspective on conflict, whereby one might attain victory without going to battle. Though in the West their text is called The Art of War, in China it is still known as the Sun Tzu, named for the patriarch of their lineage.