Page:Sun Tzu on The art of war.djvu/35

 with the earliest editions then available. Fortunately, two versions of Sun Tzŭ, even older than the newly discovered work, were still extant, one buried in the T‘ung Tien, Tu Yu’s great treatise on the Constitution, the other similarly enshrined in the T‘ai P‘ing Yü Lan encyclopaedia. In both the complete text is to be found, though split up into fragments, intermixed with other matter, and scattered piecemeal over a number of different sections. Considering that the Yü Lan takes us back to the year 983, and the T‘ung Tien about 200 years further still, to the middle of the T‘ang dynasty, the value of these early transcripts of Sun Tzŭ can hardly be overestimated. Yet the idea of utilising them does not seem to have occurred to anyone until Sun Hsing-yen, acting under Government instructions, undertook a thorough recension of the text. This is his own account: —

The three individuals here referred to had evidently been occupied on the text of Sun Tzŭ prior to Sun Hsing-yen’s commission, but we are left in doubt as to the work they really accomplished. At any rate, the new edition, when ultimately produced, appeared in the names of Sun Hsing-yen and only one co-editor, Wu Jên-chi. They took the “original text” as their basis, and by careful comparison with the older versions, as well as the extant commentaries and other sources of information such as