The Way of War. Chinese Strategy Manual. C. Ioutsen

      Such a method as employed in creating this book, however crude and unscholarly it may appear to some, is nevertheless not altogether out of line with a common medieval attitude to venerated classics.

      Oral teachings of prominent people were compiled, often decades or even centuries later, commented upon, then recompiled with commentaries interpolated in the (more or less) genuine text, taken apart for anthologies and reassembled and recompiled yet again, with a possible falsification or two somewhere along the way, to a point when it was quite impossible to say whether the original author had anything to do with any of it at all.

      The medieval passion for compilation and commentary, not infrequently rather unscrupulous (shared, as it would seem, by both the Chinese and – much later – the Europeans), is presumably the case even with the treatises par excellence: Master Sun’s The Art of War, Master Lao’s Dao De Jing, Master Kong’s Analects.

      Texts of this sort may read as coherent narratives today (although Master Sun’s does not), particularly after a fair amount of editing has been involved, but they are not, nor have ever been. Which means, that bringing them to an attention of a modern reader through yet another textual deconstruction could be justified.