#there are multiple versions of dao de jing

[niteshade925]

“大方无隅，大器免成，大音希声，大象无形。”

--《道德经》，第四十一章（马王堆帛书版）

"The greatest space has no corners;

The greatest object doesn't need to be formed;

The loudest sound cannot be heard;

The greatest form has no shape."

--Dao De Jing, Chapter 41 (Mawangdui silk version; edited from Keith H. Seddon's translation)

[river-in-the-woods]

Hi! I'm interested in learning more about Buddhism, but I'm not really sure where to start. Is there a specific translation version of the dao de jing youd recommend, or any other books in English that do a particularly good job? I'm especially interested in breath practices, additionally!

Hi there!

The Daodejing is a Daoist text, not Buddhist, but still worth a read as it can help improve your understanding of Buddhist concepts.

If you want a book specifically, then the Red Pine translation includes several commentaries (it can also be found online.)

Otherwise I'd recommend looking at these websites which have translations of the entire text:

https://www.egreenway.com/taoism/ttclzindex.htm

https://www.taoistic.com/taoteching-laotzu/taoteching-01.htm

There's a reason why the Daodejing has hundreds of translations, and it's that the text and its meaning is meant to be meditated on, played with and applied to various situations to explore their meaning.

It's also a difficult text to translate because it is poetry, where every word or phrase can have multiple meanings. It is eloquent, concise, vague and open to interpretation. As it is meant to be. The very nature of Dao cannot be grasped or explained in words; it is in our attempts at grasping that we can exercise our mind and arrive at profound realisations. But then we have to release our grasping so that more realisations can occur.

So I urge you not to dwell on any one translation or explanation as being correct, complete or adequate.

As for breathing techniques, I don't really know any books on them. All the techniques I know were taught to me by a teacher. But there are plenty of videos and guides online. I recommend learning the Nine Breaths Purification which is good to do at the beginning of every practice.

Learn how to breathe deeply and mindfully in a way that makes you feel relaxed but alert and more aware, focusing on the breath as it travels, keeping your body upright and comfortable – this is the only technique you really need. Its simplicity is what makes it effective, yet also difficult to master. But once you get past the difficulty, it feels blissful.

Enjoy 🌿

[rainydayscore]

how do you do that

for reading the dao de jing i use these two translations, it's handy to have multiple translations on hand and to compare them because it makes you aware of some nuances and sometimes you just might struggle parsing some lines

I have the Zhuangzhi here

And as a special treat here's the copy I use of the Su Nu Jing so you know how to have sex correctly. I don't really remember where I got it from.

[party-hard-or-die]

The Art of Drawing ‘The Art of War’

A conversation with C.C. Tsai, a Chinese artist and illustrator of Sunzi’s classic “The Art of War” (Princeton University Press, 2018), translated into English by Brian Bruya.

When C.C. Tsai decided to adapt Sunzi’s “The Art of War” into a more contemporary format more than 30 years ago, his ambition was to breathe new life into the 2,500-year-old text. “When people talk about transmitting the classics to the present generation, it’s often very sterile and uniform and, frankly, boring,” Tsai said. After studying multiple editions of the text and secondary sources about it, he saw an opportunity to reconceive “The Art of War” — which to this day remains one of the most important pieces of writing on warfare and strategy — as an illustrated narrative. In 1990, Tsai created a comic-book version for a Chinese audience, and an English-language edition followed in 1994. Since then, Tsai’s extended series of illustrated classics have sold millions of copies and have been translated to more than 20 languages.

Tsai’s adaptation of “The Art of War” revitalized the millenniums-old treatise by trimming away the repetitive elements, tightening the narrative until the ancient lessons of warfare leapt off the page. But the defining element of Tsai’s work is the illustrations. His Disney-influenced style brings humor and immediacy to the text, with Sunzi himself popping into the story as both the wise and fearless commander of blank-eyed, child-like soldiers and the conniving nemesis to the enemy who tries to cross him. Humiliated soldiers seethe and bluster while Sunzi and his men titter with laughter. A particular pleasure is the anthropomorphized livestock, like the horse who surrenders while standing on its hind legs with hooves raised in the air, mirroring its rider’s hands-up posture. Tsai’s characters are drawn to entertain, whether you’re a comic-book enthusiast or a military strategist.

In June, Princeton University Press released a new edition of Tsai’s adaptation with a foreword by Lawrence Freedman, a longtime professor of war studies at King’s College London. Freedman makes note of something hinted at throughout Tsai’s drawings: Sunzi is a brilliant military commander, but he’s also amoral, “celebrating ruthlessness as well as cunning.” According to Freedman, this is why Sunzi has become associated with villains of Western fiction like Gordon Gekko (from the Oliver Stone film “Wall Street”) and Tony Soprano. Sunzi can be thought of as the master manipulator — always controlling all the pieces (literally on a chessboard in some panels) to stay a step ahead the enemy.

From his home in Hangzhou, China, Tsai spoke about Sunzi, his own time in the military and what readers often misunderstand about “The Art of War.”

The style of the illustrations is such a drastic departure from the traditional presentation of the text. How did you come to choose the style you used for this book?

When I started to think about how to present Chinese classics to a contemporary audience, I felt like I had two duties. One was to thoroughly understand it myself, and the second was to lead the reader through a door into a field that they might be apprehensive about and have some kind of fear of. My duty, I felt, was to use humor and stories to get the ideas across, to get the reader to relax and to be able to accept these ideas in a straightforward and simple format. I feel like this is one of the strengths of the comic format.

I read that you’ve developed 20 different styles of drawing. So how did you choose the style you used in “The Art of War”? And what would you call it?

I do have many styles, and if you see them without my name attached, you’d never know that they were drawn by me. When I did this series with “The Art of War” and Confucius and so on, the style is all pretty much the same, except that if you look closely, you’ll notice the style of “The Art of War” is whimsical to an extent, but it’s more serious than in, say, the Daoist books, which are even more whimsical and humorous. In “The Art of War,” I used very simple lines, and if something didn’t need to be drawn, it was left out. You can see a lot of white space. When something did need to be drawn, I put a lot of detail into it. Even if you look at the smallest horse or person or roof, you can see a lot of details in each one. I don’t have a name for any particular style, but I try to tailor the style to the content.

I understand that you first read “The Art of War” when you were very young. Is there anything in the text that you recall connecting with as an adult that you didn’t when reading it as a child?

Yes. Some things did stand out to me when I was trying to really understand the central ideas and the spirit of the text, like the idea that you should win before you go to war. And that when you lose a war, it’s because you haven’t prepared adequately. Also, that you shouldn’t fight without there being clear goals. You have to have some reason to go to war. Also, that anger is something one should be very cautious about when it comes to warfare. That it shouldn’t be a pretext to warfare.

How did you approach adapting the original text to comic form?

I focused on what I thought were the most important ideas and stories, and so it’s not drawn in its entirety. “The Art of War” is not a really long text, but it is longer than other Chinese classics, like the “Dao De Jing.” So I didn’t draw every word from it. But I think one could say that I’ve drawn all the ideas in it.

What do you think people most often get wrong about “The Art of War”?

I think there is a basic misunderstanding that it’s not really about war — it’s about preventing war. From very early times, the Chinese attitude toward warfare was that you need to end it as quickly as possible. The way to do that was to use irregular fighting: special strategies and tactics so that you could minimize the loss of life and the damage to crops and villages and so on. This started very early in Chinese history. Sunzi says the point of warfare is not the fighting but the winning. He says that anger can turn to happiness later, but a dead person can’t be brought back to life. A country that is lost can’t be brought back either. So the main goal of war from a Chinese perspective is to avoid it at all costs, or to figure out how to win while suffering the least amount of damage.

Can you expand on that idea of preventing warfare?

One way to think about it is when the Chinese settled and became an agricultural society, they had some valuable land, and it would often be attacked by outsiders. So they had to figure out how to defend it. War was not about imperialists going to take something from someone else; it was about defending. If you think about the Great Wall, the Great Wall was not built to attack or to take over somebody else’s land. It was to keep out invaders. China actually had very few horses in the oldest days, like in Sunzi’s time, so they had to figure out ways to fight these advancing cavalries. They had to be very clever about it. If you look at “The Art of War,” it’s about preparation. Only very little of it is about how to actually fight, and I think that people tend to neglect that.

You served in the military for a time yourself. Can you tell me a little about it?

I went into the Taiwanese military in 1968 when I was 20 years old. I was in the air force. In Taiwan, it was always as if a war was coming but the war never actually came. The Chinese on the mainland were shelling one of Taiwan’s islands in the Taiwan Strait, and it was a very scary time. But really, most of the time, it was just for show. We would sit in the barracks and play chess and so on. So in one sense, in my lifetime that I’ve been in Taiwan, there hasn’t been a war at all. You could call me very fortunate.

I was in an antiaircraft artillery unit, and I went to my commanding officer and said: “Look, I’m very good at drawing. It would be a waste to have me just standing guard eight hours a day,” which was basically what people in my unit did. They gave me the job of drawing instruction manuals for these three different kinds of antiaircraft guns we had. And as I drew them, I also inserted stories so they would be more enjoyable for the soldiers to read and understand. I’m not very good at taking orders, so I tried to find a place in the military where I could live in a way where I didn’t feel like I was actually in the military.

John Ismay is a staff writer who covers armed conflict for The New York Times Magazine. He is based in Washington.

Interview has been condensed and edited. Illustrations from “The Art of War” by Sunzi. Adapted and illustrated by C. C. Tsai. Copyright © 2018 by Princeton University Press.

Sign up for our newsletter to get the best of The New York Times Magazine delivered to your inbox every week. For more coverage of conflict, visit nytimes.com/atwar.

The post The Art of Drawing ‘The Art of War’ appeared first on World The News.

from World The News https://ift.tt/2MSpGeD via Breaking News

[dragnews]

The Art of Drawing ‘The Art of War’

A conversation with C.C. Tsai, a Chinese artist and illustrator of Sunzi’s classic “The Art of War” (Princeton University Press, 2018), translated into English by Brian Bruya.

When C.C. Tsai decided to adapt Sunzi’s “The Art of War” into a more contemporary format more than 30 years ago, his ambition was to breathe new life into the 2,500-year-old text. “When people talk about transmitting the classics to the present generation, it’s often very sterile and uniform and, frankly, boring,” Tsai said. After studying multiple editions of the text and secondary sources about it, he saw an opportunity to reconceive “The Art of War” — which to this day remains one of the most important pieces of writing on warfare and strategy — as an illustrated narrative. In 1990, Tsai created a comic-book version for a Chinese audience, and an English-language edition followed in 1994. Since then, Tsai’s extended series of illustrated classics have sold millions of copies and have been translated to more than 20 languages.

Tsai’s adaptation of “The Art of War” revitalized the millenniums-old treatise by trimming away the repetitive elements, tightening the narrative until the ancient lessons of warfare leapt off the page. But the defining element of Tsai’s work is the illustrations. His Disney-influenced style brings humor and immediacy to the text, with Sunzi himself popping into the story as both the wise and fearless commander of blank-eyed, child-like soldiers and the conniving nemesis to the enemy who tries to cross him. Humiliated soldiers seethe and bluster while Sunzi and his men titter with laughter. A particular pleasure is the anthropomorphized livestock, like the horse who surrenders while standing on its hind legs with hooves raised in the air, mirroring its rider’s hands-up posture. Tsai’s characters are drawn to entertain, whether you’re a comic-book enthusiast or a military strategist.

In June, Princeton University Press released a new edition of Tsai’s adaptation with a foreword by Lawrence Freedman, a longtime professor of war studies at King’s College London. Freedman makes note of something hinted at throughout Tsai’s drawings: Sunzi is a brilliant military commander, but he’s also amoral, “celebrating ruthlessness as well as cunning.” According to Freedman, this is why Sunzi has become associated with villains of Western fiction like Gordon Gekko (from the Oliver Stone film “Wall Street”) and Tony Soprano. Sunzi can be thought of as the master manipulator — always controlling all the pieces (literally on a chessboard in some panels) to stay a step ahead the enemy.

From his home in Hangzhou, China, Tsai spoke about Sunzi, his own time in the military and what readers often misunderstand about “The Art of War.”

The style of the illustrations is such a drastic departure from the traditional presentation of the text. How did you come to choose the style you used for this book?

When I started to think about how to present Chinese classics to a contemporary audience, I felt like I had two duties. One was to thoroughly understand it myself, and the second was to lead the reader through a door into a field that they might be apprehensive about and have some kind of fear of. My duty, I felt, was to use humor and stories to get the ideas across, to get the reader to relax and to be able to accept these ideas in a straightforward and simple format. I feel like this is one of the strengths of the comic format.

I read that you’ve developed 20 different styles of drawing. So how did you choose the style you used in “The Art of War”? And what would you call it?

I do have many styles, and if you see them without my name attached, you’d never know that they were drawn by me. When I did this series with “The Art of War” and Confucius and so on, the style is all pretty much the same, except that if you look closely, you’ll notice the style of “The Art of War” is whimsical to an extent, but it’s more serious than in, say, the Daoist books, which are even more whimsical and humorous. In “The Art of War,” I used very simple lines, and if something didn’t need to be drawn, it was left out. You can see a lot of white space. When something did need to be drawn, I put a lot of detail into it. Even if you look at the smallest horse or person or roof, you can see a lot of details in each one. I don’t have a name for any particular style, but I try to tailor the style to the content.

I understand that you first read “The Art of War” when you were very young. Is there anything in the text that you recall connecting with as an adult that you didn’t when reading it as a child?

Yes. Some things did stand out to me when I was trying to really understand the central ideas and the spirit of the text, like the idea that you should win before you go to war. And that when you lose a war, it’s because you haven’t prepared adequately. Also, that you shouldn’t fight without there being clear goals. You have to have some reason to go to war. Also, that anger is something one should be very cautious about when it comes to warfare. That it shouldn’t be a pretext to warfare.

How did you approach adapting the original text to comic form?

I focused on what I thought were the most important ideas and stories, and so it’s not drawn in its entirety. “The Art of War” is not a really long text, but it is longer than other Chinese classics, like the “Dao De Jing.” So I didn’t draw every word from it. But I think one could say that I’ve drawn all the ideas in it.

What do you think people most often get wrong about “The Art of War”?

I think there is a basic misunderstanding that it’s not really about war — it’s about preventing war. From very early times, the Chinese attitude toward warfare was that you need to end it as quickly as possible. The way to do that was to use irregular fighting: special strategies and tactics so that you could minimize the loss of life and the damage to crops and villages and so on. This started very early in Chinese history. Sunzi says the point of warfare is not the fighting but the winning. He says that anger can turn to happiness later, but a dead person can’t be brought back to life. A country that is lost can’t be brought back either. So the main goal of war from a Chinese perspective is to avoid it at all costs, or to figure out how to win while suffering the least amount of damage.

Can you expand on that idea of preventing warfare?

One way to think about it is when the Chinese settled and became an agricultural society, they had some valuable land, and it would often be attacked by outsiders. So they had to figure out how to defend it. War was not about imperialists going to take something from someone else; it was about defending. If you think about the Great Wall, the Great Wall was not built to attack or to take over somebody else’s land. It was to keep out invaders. China actually had very few horses in the oldest days, like in Sunzi’s time, so they had to figure out ways to fight these advancing cavalries. They had to be very clever about it. If you look at “The Art of War,” it’s about preparation. Only very little of it is about how to actually fight, and I think that people tend to neglect that.

You served in the military for a time yourself. Can you tell me a little about it?

I went into the Taiwanese military in 1968 when I was 20 years old. I was in the air force. In Taiwan, it was always as if a war was coming but the war never actually came. The Chinese on the mainland were shelling one of Taiwan’s islands in the Taiwan Strait, and it was a very scary time. But really, most of the time, it was just for show. We would sit in the barracks and play chess and so on. So in one sense, in my lifetime that I’ve been in Taiwan, there hasn’t been a war at all. You could call me very fortunate.

I was in an antiaircraft artillery unit, and I went to my commanding officer and said: “Look, I’m very good at drawing. It would be a waste to have me just standing guard eight hours a day,” which was basically what people in my unit did. They gave me the job of drawing instruction manuals for these three different kinds of antiaircraft guns we had. And as I drew them, I also inserted stories so they would be more enjoyable for the soldiers to read and understand. I’m not very good at taking orders, so I tried to find a place in the military where I could live in a way where I didn’t feel like I was actually in the military.

John Ismay is a staff writer who covers armed conflict for The New York Times Magazine. He is based in Washington.

Interview has been condensed and edited. Illustrations from “The Art of War” by Sunzi. Adapted and illustrated by C. C. Tsai. Copyright © 2018 by Princeton University Press.

Sign up for our newsletter to get the best of The New York Times Magazine delivered to your inbox every week. For more coverage of conflict, visit nytimes.com/atwar.

The post The Art of Drawing ‘The Art of War’ appeared first on World The News.

from World The News https://ift.tt/2MSpGeD via Today News

[cleopatrarps]

The Art of Drawing ‘The Art of War’

A conversation with C.C. Tsai, a Chinese artist and illustrator of Sunzi’s classic “The Art of War” (Princeton University Press, 2018), translated into English by Brian Bruya.

When C.C. Tsai decided to adapt Sunzi’s “The Art of War” into a more contemporary format more than 30 years ago, his ambition was to breathe new life into the 2,500-year-old text. “When people talk about transmitting the classics to the present generation, it’s often very sterile and uniform and, frankly, boring,” Tsai said. After studying multiple editions of the text and secondary sources about it, he saw an opportunity to reconceive “The Art of War” — which to this day remains one of the most important pieces of writing on warfare and strategy — as an illustrated narrative. In 1990, Tsai created a comic-book version for a Chinese audience, and an English-language edition followed in 1994. Since then, Tsai’s extended series of illustrated classics have sold millions of copies and have been translated to more than 20 languages.

Tsai’s adaptation of “The Art of War” revitalized the millenniums-old treatise by trimming away the repetitive elements, tightening the narrative until the ancient lessons of warfare leapt off the page. But the defining element of Tsai’s work is the illustrations. His Disney-influenced style brings humor and immediacy to the text, with Sunzi himself popping into the story as both the wise and fearless commander of blank-eyed, child-like soldiers and the conniving nemesis to the enemy who tries to cross him. Humiliated soldiers seethe and bluster while Sunzi and his men titter with laughter. A particular pleasure is the anthropomorphized livestock, like the horse who surrenders while standing on its hind legs with hooves raised in the air, mirroring its rider’s hands-up posture. Tsai’s characters are drawn to entertain, whether you’re a comic-book enthusiast or a military strategist.

In June, Princeton University Press released a new edition of Tsai’s adaptation with a foreword by Lawrence Freedman, a longtime professor of war studies at King’s College London. Freedman makes note of something hinted at throughout Tsai’s drawings: Sunzi is a brilliant military commander, but he’s also amoral, “celebrating ruthlessness as well as cunning.” According to Freedman, this is why Sunzi has become associated with villains of Western fiction like Gordon Gekko (from the Oliver Stone film “Wall Street”) and Tony Soprano. Sunzi can be thought of as the master manipulator — always controlling all the pieces (literally on a chessboard in some panels) to stay a step ahead the enemy.

From his home in Hangzhou, China, Tsai spoke about Sunzi, his own time in the military and what readers often misunderstand about “The Art of War.”

The style of the illustrations is such a drastic departure from the traditional presentation of the text. How did you come to choose the style you used for this book?

When I started to think about how to present Chinese classics to a contemporary audience, I felt like I had two duties. One was to thoroughly understand it myself, and the second was to lead the reader through a door into a field that they might be apprehensive about and have some kind of fear of. My duty, I felt, was to use humor and stories to get the ideas across, to get the reader to relax and to be able to accept these ideas in a straightforward and simple format. I feel like this is one of the strengths of the comic format.

I read that you’ve developed 20 different styles of drawing. So how did you choose the style you used in “The Art of War”? And what would you call it?

I do have many styles, and if you see them without my name attached, you’d never know that they were drawn by me. When I did this series with “The Art of War” and Confucius and so on, the style is all pretty much the same, except that if you look closely, you’ll notice the style of “The Art of War” is whimsical to an extent, but it’s more serious than in, say, the Daoist books, which are even more whimsical and humorous. In “The Art of War,” I used very simple lines, and if something didn’t need to be drawn, it was left out. You can see a lot of white space. When something did need to be drawn, I put a lot of detail into it. Even if you look at the smallest horse or person or roof, you can see a lot of details in each one. I don’t have a name for any particular style, but I try to tailor the style to the content.

I understand that you first read “The Art of War” when you were very young. Is there anything in the text that you recall connecting with as an adult that you didn’t when reading it as a child?

Yes. Some things did stand out to me when I was trying to really understand the central ideas and the spirit of the text, like the idea that you should win before you go to war. And that when you lose a war, it’s because you haven’t prepared adequately. Also, that you shouldn’t fight without there being clear goals. You have to have some reason to go to war. Also, that anger is something one should be very cautious about when it comes to warfare. That it shouldn’t be a pretext to warfare.

How did you approach adapting the original text to comic form?

I focused on what I thought were the most important ideas and stories, and so it’s not drawn in its entirety. “The Art of War” is not a really long text, but it is longer than other Chinese classics, like the “Dao De Jing.” So I didn’t draw every word from it. But I think one could say that I’ve drawn all the ideas in it.

What do you think people most often get wrong about “The Art of War”?

I think there is a basic misunderstanding that it’s not really about war — it’s about preventing war. From very early times, the Chinese attitude toward warfare was that you need to end it as quickly as possible. The way to do that was to use irregular fighting: special strategies and tactics so that you could minimize the loss of life and the damage to crops and villages and so on. This started very early in Chinese history. Sunzi says the point of warfare is not the fighting but the winning. He says that anger can turn to happiness later, but a dead person can’t be brought back to life. A country that is lost can’t be brought back either. So the main goal of war from a Chinese perspective is to avoid it at all costs, or to figure out how to win while suffering the least amount of damage.

Can you expand on that idea of preventing warfare?

One way to think about it is when the Chinese settled and became an agricultural society, they had some valuable land, and it would often be attacked by outsiders. So they had to figure out how to defend it. War was not about imperialists going to take something from someone else; it was about defending. If you think about the Great Wall, the Great Wall was not built to attack or to take over somebody else’s land. It was to keep out invaders. China actually had very few horses in the oldest days, like in Sunzi’s time, so they had to figure out ways to fight these advancing cavalries. They had to be very clever about it. If you look at “The Art of War,” it’s about preparation. Only very little of it is about how to actually fight, and I think that people tend to neglect that.

You served in the military for a time yourself. Can you tell me a little about it?

I went into the Taiwanese military in 1968 when I was 20 years old. I was in the air force. In Taiwan, it was always as if a war was coming but the war never actually came. The Chinese on the mainland were shelling one of Taiwan’s islands in the Taiwan Strait, and it was a very scary time. But really, most of the time, it was just for show. We would sit in the barracks and play chess and so on. So in one sense, in my lifetime that I’ve been in Taiwan, there hasn’t been a war at all. You could call me very fortunate.

I was in an antiaircraft artillery unit, and I went to my commanding officer and said: “Look, I’m very good at drawing. It would be a waste to have me just standing guard eight hours a day,” which was basically what people in my unit did. They gave me the job of drawing instruction manuals for these three different kinds of antiaircraft guns we had. And as I drew them, I also inserted stories so they would be more enjoyable for the soldiers to read and understand. I’m not very good at taking orders, so I tried to find a place in the military where I could live in a way where I didn’t feel like I was actually in the military.

John Ismay is a staff writer who covers armed conflict for The New York Times Magazine. He is based in Washington.

Interview has been condensed and edited. Illustrations from “The Art of War” by Sunzi. Adapted and illustrated by C. C. Tsai. Copyright © 2018 by Princeton University Press.

Sign up for our newsletter to get the best of The New York Times Magazine delivered to your inbox every week. For more coverage of conflict, visit nytimes.com/atwar.

The post The Art of Drawing ‘The Art of War’ appeared first on World The News.

from World The News https://ift.tt/2MSpGeD via News of World

[dani-qrt]

The Art of Drawing ‘The Art of War’

A conversation with C.C. Tsai, a Chinese artist and illustrator of Sunzi’s classic “The Art of War” (Princeton University Press, 2018), translated into English by Brian Bruya.

When C.C. Tsai decided to adapt Sunzi’s “The Art of War” into a more contemporary format more than 30 years ago, his ambition was to breathe new life into the 2,500-year-old text. “When people talk about transmitting the classics to the present generation, it’s often very sterile and uniform and, frankly, boring,” Tsai said. After studying multiple editions of the text and secondary sources about it, he saw an opportunity to reconceive “The Art of War” — which to this day remains one of the most important pieces of writing on warfare and strategy — as an illustrated narrative. In 1990, Tsai created a comic-book version for a Chinese audience, and an English-language edition followed in 1994. Since then, Tsai’s extended series of illustrated classics have sold millions of copies and have been translated to more than 20 languages.

Tsai’s adaptation of “The Art of War” revitalized the millenniums-old treatise by trimming away the repetitive elements, tightening the narrative until the ancient lessons of warfare leapt off the page. But the defining element of Tsai’s work is the illustrations. His Disney-influenced style brings humor and immediacy to the text, with Sunzi himself popping into the story as both the wise and fearless commander of blank-eyed, child-like soldiers and the conniving nemesis to the enemy who tries to cross him. Humiliated soldiers seethe and bluster while Sunzi and his men titter with laughter. A particular pleasure is the anthropomorphized livestock, like the horse who surrenders while standing on its hind legs with hooves raised in the air, mirroring its rider’s hands-up posture. Tsai’s characters are drawn to entertain, whether you’re a comic-book enthusiast or a military strategist.

In June, Princeton University Press released a new edition of Tsai’s adaptation with a foreword by Lawrence Freedman, a longtime professor of war studies at King’s College London. Freedman makes note of something hinted at throughout Tsai’s drawings: Sunzi is a brilliant military commander, but he’s also amoral, “celebrating ruthlessness as well as cunning.” According to Freedman, this is why Sunzi has become associated with villains of Western fiction like Gordon Gekko (from the Oliver Stone film “Wall Street”) and Tony Soprano. Sunzi can be thought of as the master manipulator — always controlling all the pieces (literally on a chessboard in some panels) to stay a step ahead the enemy.

From his home in Hangzhou, China, Tsai spoke about Sunzi, his own time in the military and what readers often misunderstand about “The Art of War.”

The style of the illustrations is such a drastic departure from the traditional presentation of the text. How did you come to choose the style you used for this book?

When I started to think about how to present Chinese classics to a contemporary audience, I felt like I had two duties. One was to thoroughly understand it myself, and the second was to lead the reader through a door into a field that they might be apprehensive about and have some kind of fear of. My duty, I felt, was to use humor and stories to get the ideas across, to get the reader to relax and to be able to accept these ideas in a straightforward and simple format. I feel like this is one of the strengths of the comic format.

I read that you’ve developed 20 different styles of drawing. So how did you choose the style you used in “The Art of War”? And what would you call it?

I do have many styles, and if you see them without my name attached, you’d never know that they were drawn by me. When I did this series with “The Art of War” and Confucius and so on, the style is all pretty much the same, except that if you look closely, you’ll notice the style of “The Art of War” is whimsical to an extent, but it’s more serious than in, say, the Daoist books, which are even more whimsical and humorous. In “The Art of War,” I used very simple lines, and if something didn’t need to be drawn, it was left out. You can see a lot of white space. When something did need to be drawn, I put a lot of detail into it. Even if you look at the smallest horse or person or roof, you can see a lot of details in each one. I don’t have a name for any particular style, but I try to tailor the style to the content.

I understand that you first read “The Art of War” when you were very young. Is there anything in the text that you recall connecting with as an adult that you didn’t when reading it as a child?

Yes. Some things did stand out to me when I was trying to really understand the central ideas and the spirit of the text, like the idea that you should win before you go to war. And that when you lose a war, it’s because you haven’t prepared adequately. Also, that you shouldn’t fight without there being clear goals. You have to have some reason to go to war. Also, that anger is something one should be very cautious about when it comes to warfare. That it shouldn’t be a pretext to warfare.

How did you approach adapting the original text to comic form?

I focused on what I thought were the most important ideas and stories, and so it’s not drawn in its entirety. “The Art of War” is not a really long text, but it is longer than other Chinese classics, like the “Dao De Jing.” So I didn’t draw every word from it. But I think one could say that I’ve drawn all the ideas in it.

What do you think people most often get wrong about “The Art of War”?

I think there is a basic misunderstanding that it’s not really about war — it’s about preventing war. From very early times, the Chinese attitude toward warfare was that you need to end it as quickly as possible. The way to do that was to use irregular fighting: special strategies and tactics so that you could minimize the loss of life and the damage to crops and villages and so on. This started very early in Chinese history. Sunzi says the point of warfare is not the fighting but the winning. He says that anger can turn to happiness later, but a dead person can’t be brought back to life. A country that is lost can’t be brought back either. So the main goal of war from a Chinese perspective is to avoid it at all costs, or to figure out how to win while suffering the least amount of damage.

Can you expand on that idea of preventing warfare?

One way to think about it is when the Chinese settled and became an agricultural society, they had some valuable land, and it would often be attacked by outsiders. So they had to figure out how to defend it. War was not about imperialists going to take something from someone else; it was about defending. If you think about the Great Wall, the Great Wall was not built to attack or to take over somebody else’s land. It was to keep out invaders. China actually had very few horses in the oldest days, like in Sunzi’s time, so they had to figure out ways to fight these advancing cavalries. They had to be very clever about it. If you look at “The Art of War,” it’s about preparation. Only very little of it is about how to actually fight, and I think that people tend to neglect that.

You served in the military for a time yourself. Can you tell me a little about it?

I went into the Taiwanese military in 1968 when I was 20 years old. I was in the air force. In Taiwan, it was always as if a war was coming but the war never actually came. The Chinese on the mainland were shelling one of Taiwan’s islands in the Taiwan Strait, and it was a very scary time. But really, most of the time, it was just for show. We would sit in the barracks and play chess and so on. So in one sense, in my lifetime that I’ve been in Taiwan, there hasn’t been a war at all. You could call me very fortunate.

I was in an antiaircraft artillery unit, and I went to my commanding officer and said: “Look, I’m very good at drawing. It would be a waste to have me just standing guard eight hours a day,” which was basically what people in my unit did. They gave me the job of drawing instruction manuals for these three different kinds of antiaircraft guns we had. And as I drew them, I also inserted stories so they would be more enjoyable for the soldiers to read and understand. I’m not very good at taking orders, so I tried to find a place in the military where I could live in a way where I didn’t feel like I was actually in the military.

John Ismay is a staff writer who covers armed conflict for The New York Times Magazine. He is based in Washington.

Interview has been condensed and edited. Illustrations from “The Art of War” by Sunzi. Adapted and illustrated by C. C. Tsai. Copyright © 2018 by Princeton University Press.

Sign up for our newsletter to get the best of The New York Times Magazine delivered to your inbox every week. For more coverage of conflict, visit nytimes.com/atwar.

The post The Art of Drawing ‘The Art of War’ appeared first on World The News.

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The Art of Drawing ‘The Art of War’

A conversation with C.C. Tsai, a Chinese artist and illustrator of Sunzi’s classic “The Art of War” (Princeton University Press, 2018), translated into English by Brian Bruya.

When C.C. Tsai decided to adapt Sunzi’s “The Art of War” into a more contemporary format more than 30 years ago, his ambition was to breathe new life into the 2,500-year-old text. “When people talk about transmitting the classics to the present generation, it’s often very sterile and uniform and, frankly, boring,” Tsai said. After studying multiple editions of the text and secondary sources about it, he saw an opportunity to reconceive “The Art of War” — which to this day remains one of the most important pieces of writing on warfare and strategy — as an illustrated narrative. In 1990, Tsai created a comic-book version for a Chinese audience, and an English-language edition followed in 1994. Since then, Tsai’s extended series of illustrated classics have sold millions of copies and have been translated to more than 20 languages.

Tsai’s adaptation of “The Art of War” revitalized the millenniums-old treatise by trimming away the repetitive elements, tightening the narrative until the ancient lessons of warfare leapt off the page. But the defining element of Tsai’s work is the illustrations. His Disney-influenced style brings humor and immediacy to the text, with Sunzi himself popping into the story as both the wise and fearless commander of blank-eyed, child-like soldiers and the conniving nemesis to the enemy who tries to cross him. Humiliated soldiers seethe and bluster while Sunzi and his men titter with laughter. A particular pleasure is the anthropomorphized livestock, like the horse who surrenders while standing on its hind legs with hooves raised in the air, mirroring its rider’s hands-up posture. Tsai’s characters are drawn to entertain, whether you’re a comic-book enthusiast or a military strategist.

In June, Princeton University Press released a new edition of Tsai’s adaptation with a foreword by Lawrence Freedman, a longtime professor of war studies at King’s College London. Freedman makes note of something hinted at throughout Tsai’s drawings: Sunzi is a brilliant military commander, but he’s also amoral, “celebrating ruthlessness as well as cunning.” According to Freedman, this is why Sunzi has become associated with villains of Western fiction like Gordon Gekko (from the Oliver Stone film “Wall Street”) and Tony Soprano. Sunzi can be thought of as the master manipulator — always controlling all the pieces (literally on a chessboard in some panels) to stay a step ahead the enemy.

From his home in Hangzhou, China, Tsai spoke about Sunzi, his own time in the military and what readers often misunderstand about “The Art of War.”

The style of the illustrations is such a drastic departure from the traditional presentation of the text. How did you come to choose the style you used for this book?

When I started to think about how to present Chinese classics to a contemporary audience, I felt like I had two duties. One was to thoroughly understand it myself, and the second was to lead the reader through a door into a field that they might be apprehensive about and have some kind of fear of. My duty, I felt, was to use humor and stories to get the ideas across, to get the reader to relax and to be able to accept these ideas in a straightforward and simple format. I feel like this is one of the strengths of the comic format.

I read that you’ve developed 20 different styles of drawing. So how did you choose the style you used in “The Art of War”? And what would you call it?

I do have many styles, and if you see them without my name attached, you’d never know that they were drawn by me. When I did this series with “The Art of War” and Confucius and so on, the style is all pretty much the same, except that if you look closely, you’ll notice the style of “The Art of War” is whimsical to an extent, but it’s more serious than in, say, the Daoist books, which are even more whimsical and humorous. In “The Art of War,” I used very simple lines, and if something didn’t need to be drawn, it was left out. You can see a lot of white space. When something did need to be drawn, I put a lot of detail into it. Even if you look at the smallest horse or person or roof, you can see a lot of details in each one. I don’t have a name for any particular style, but I try to tailor the style to the content.

I understand that you first read “The Art of War” when you were very young. Is there anything in the text that you recall connecting with as an adult that you didn’t when reading it as a child?

Yes. Some things did stand out to me when I was trying to really understand the central ideas and the spirit of the text, like the idea that you should win before you go to war. And that when you lose a war, it’s because you haven’t prepared adequately. Also, that you shouldn’t fight without there being clear goals. You have to have some reason to go to war. Also, that anger is something one should be very cautious about when it comes to warfare. That it shouldn’t be a pretext to warfare.

How did you approach adapting the original text to comic form?

I focused on what I thought were the most important ideas and stories, and so it’s not drawn in its entirety. “The Art of War” is not a really long text, but it is longer than other Chinese classics, like the “Dao De Jing.” So I didn’t draw every word from it. But I think one could say that I’ve drawn all the ideas in it.

What do you think people most often get wrong about “The Art of War”?

I think there is a basic misunderstanding that it’s not really about war — it’s about preventing war. From very early times, the Chinese attitude toward warfare was that you need to end it as quickly as possible. The way to do that was to use irregular fighting: special strategies and tactics so that you could minimize the loss of life and the damage to crops and villages and so on. This started very early in Chinese history. Sunzi says the point of warfare is not the fighting but the winning. He says that anger can turn to happiness later, but a dead person can’t be brought back to life. A country that is lost can’t be brought back either. So the main goal of war from a Chinese perspective is to avoid it at all costs, or to figure out how to win while suffering the least amount of damage.

Can you expand on that idea of preventing warfare?

One way to think about it is when the Chinese settled and became an agricultural society, they had some valuable land, and it would often be attacked by outsiders. So they had to figure out how to defend it. War was not about imperialists going to take something from someone else; it was about defending. If you think about the Great Wall, the Great Wall was not built to attack or to take over somebody else’s land. It was to keep out invaders. China actually had very few horses in the oldest days, like in Sunzi’s time, so they had to figure out ways to fight these advancing cavalries. They had to be very clever about it. If you look at “The Art of War,” it’s about preparation. Only very little of it is about how to actually fight, and I think that people tend to neglect that.

You served in the military for a time yourself. Can you tell me a little about it?

I went into the Taiwanese military in 1968 when I was 20 years old. I was in the air force. In Taiwan, it was always as if a war was coming but the war never actually came. The Chinese on the mainland were shelling one of Taiwan’s islands in the Taiwan Strait, and it was a very scary time. But really, most of the time, it was just for show. We would sit in the barracks and play chess and so on. So in one sense, in my lifetime that I’ve been in Taiwan, there hasn’t been a war at all. You could call me very fortunate.

I was in an antiaircraft artillery unit, and I went to my commanding officer and said: “Look, I’m very good at drawing. It would be a waste to have me just standing guard eight hours a day,” which was basically what people in my unit did. They gave me the job of drawing instruction manuals for these three different kinds of antiaircraft guns we had. And as I drew them, I also inserted stories so they would be more enjoyable for the soldiers to read and understand. I’m not very good at taking orders, so I tried to find a place in the military where I could live in a way where I didn’t feel like I was actually in the military.

John Ismay is a staff writer who covers armed conflict for The New York Times Magazine. He is based in Washington.

Interview has been condensed and edited. Illustrations from “The Art of War” by Sunzi. Adapted and illustrated by C. C. Tsai. Copyright © 2018 by Princeton University Press.

Sign up for our newsletter to get the best of The New York Times Magazine delivered to your inbox every week. For more coverage of conflict, visit nytimes.com/atwar.

The post The Art of Drawing ‘The Art of War’ appeared first on World The News.

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