Heaven is yin and yang

Critical Text

Yinqueshan Text

天者陰陽寒暑時制也順逆兵勝也

Shiyijia zhu Text

天者陰陽寒暑時制也

Translation

Heaven is yin and yang, cold and hot, the order of the seasons. Going with it, going against it--this is military victory.

Annotations

"Heaven" (tian 天) occupies the minds of most Warring States thinkers. The Sunzi's definition appears at first to be in opposition to the more "religious" or "philosophical" trends within Masters discourse. Thus there is some beauty in Griffith's reduction of this term to "weather," though it obscures the triad "Heaven, Earth, and Humanity" (Samuel Griffith, Sun Tzu--the Art of War [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963], p. 64). We should also not ignore the cosmological import of this definition, which begins with yin and yang and includes seasonal regularity. Furthermore, as Li Ling 李零　 has argued, other Sunzi-related texts that were found with the Yinqueshan materials see the strategic power of a place partly in geomantic terms (" Du Sunzi zhaji " 讀孫子札記 [Notes on reading the Sunzi], in Sunzi xintan 孫子新探 [New investigations of the Sunzi ][Peking: PLA Press, 1990], pp. 189-206, esp. pp. 201-204). These newly discovered passages speak of orienting attack and defense by the four directions, yin and yang, or left and right.

When discussions of yin and yang or high and low occur in the received text of the Sunzi, it is always possible to understand them in narrowly strategic terms. By contrast, the Yinqueshan text adds at the end of its definition of heaven the phrase "Going with and going against--[these are] military victories" (shunni bingsheng ye 順逆兵勝也). Shun and ni refer to alignment with the movements of cosmic phenomena and the benefit or loss that accrue from such. They are part of the vocabulary of the "yin-yang militarists" whose existence the Hanshu yiwenzhi (Bibliography of the history of the former Han) posits. In this context, then, Li Ling regards the phrase"bingsheng" as a reference to the Five Phases conquest cycle (Wu Sunzi fawei, p. 31).