The rush of water

Critical Text

Yinqueshan Text

水之疾至於。。。

Shiyijia zhu Text

激水之疾至於漂石者勢也鷙鳥之疾至於毀折者節也故善戰者其勢險其節短 勢如擴弩節如發機

Translation

The rush of water, to the point of tossing rocks about. This is shi. The strike of a hawk, at the killing snap. This is the node. Therefore, one skilled at battle: his shi is steep. His node is short. Shi is like drawing the crossbow. The node is like pulling the trigger.

Annotations

These passages provide three images of shi 勢. For their analysis, see the essay "Taking Whole," The Art of War, pp. 72-74.

Jie 節 has generally been misunderstood here as meaning "to control, abstain," implying that one should hold back until the right moment to strike. Though the sense is partially correct, these interpretations overlook the root meaning of jie as "the node in bamboo"--that small juncture between its sections. For a brief analysis, see The Art of War, p. 155.

Although the Yinqueshan text survives only for the last line of the previous passage and the first line of this, both give us evidence of how later editors have striven to make the text more "literate," removing some repeated words and adding others to increase parallelism.

In chapter 4 we have seen several instances where the received texts have shan zhan zhe, "those skilled at battle," and the Yinqueshan text reads shan zhe, "the skilled." It is possible that in this instance, too, the missing Yinqueshan text would have read simply shan zhan. But note that in section 9, below, the strip from Yinqueshan unequivocally reads shan zhan zhe. We have therefore not amended the text here.