Why Does Not Fighting Depend on Us?

A fresh translation of today’s passage

Original text

Notes on the wording

• Bu zhan zhe zai wo (不戰者在我)
  The conditions that make non-engagement possible lie with one’s own side. The phrase does not ask the enemy to remain peaceful.
• Bi zhan zhe zai di (必戰者在敵)
  The paired phrase concerns inducing the enemy to move into a situation where engagement becomes unavoidable.
• Draw a line and defend it (畫地而守之)
  A deliberately extreme image. Its force lies not in the physical strength of the line but in choosing a place the enemy does not need to attack.
• Turn away from where he is going (乖其所之)
  The verb guai carries the sense of diverging or failing to coincide. The two sides no longer meet at the enemy’s intended objective.
• Jiao sui (交綏)
  A term used immediately before this excerpt for opposing armies withdrawing without dissolving their formations.

Contact does not yet decide the battle

Taizong’s question begins from a compelling picture. Two battle lines have come into each other’s presence. Each can see the other. If the campaign has advanced this far, he asks in effect, how can anyone still speak of not fighting?

Li Jing answers by widening the moment before attack. He first recalls armies of Jin and Qin meeting and then withdrawing. He also quotes the Sima Fa: do not chase a fleeing enemy too far, and do not press too closely against an orderly retreat. Presence creates danger, but it does not erase judgment.

An army may withdraw without becoming a rout. Its banners can remain controlled, its ranks coherent, and its commander able to choose the next movement. Pursuing such a formation may give it precisely the opening it wants. Li Jing is not praising timidity. He is refusing to confuse motion with opportunity.

The distinction is practical. “We have found the enemy” and “we should attack the enemy” are separate statements. If a commander treats them as one, the enemy can determine the commander’s schedule merely by appearing.

Why ordered banners matter

Immediately before the selected lines, Li Jing invokes another maxim from Sunzi: do not strike a stately formation and do not intercept well-ordered banners. The words “stately” and “well ordered” are diagnostic. They tell the observer that the opposing army has not yet lost its structure.

The passage therefore asks the commander to read visible signs. Are units maintaining distance? Do the banners still communicate? Is withdrawal controlled or panicked? The answers matter more than the excitement of seeing an opponent move away.

A prohibition such as “do not strike” is itself an order. It does not leave the army idle. Soldiers must hold their formation, resist the lure of pursuit, and wait for a change that produces a real advantage. Restraint has to be organized.

This is why “not fighting” belongs inside military art. The same exchange also discusses “must fight.” Li Jing does not set peace against warfare as moral opposites. He distinguishes moments in which engagement should be withheld from moments in which the enemy can be compelled to engage.

The work hidden inside refusal

“Not fighting depends on us” can sound as though a commander simply makes an inward decision. The quotation says more. One must alter the relation between one’s position and the enemy’s purpose. If the enemy advances toward a particular objective, the defender does not automatically make that objective the site of battle.

The image of a line scratched into the earth sharpens the point. A line has no wall, tower, or gate. Sunzi’s claim cannot mean that any weak defense magically repels an attack. The reason comes in the final clause: the defender has diverged from the place toward which the enemy is going.

The operative question is not only “How strong is my fortification?” It is also “Why would the enemy need to fight me here?” A position can be tactically unimportant to the enemy. A force can relinquish one line while protecting a more important route. By refusing to coincide with the enemy’s desired point, it denies the enemy an engagement on favorable terms.

That freedom requires collective capacity. “Us” includes placement, movement, command, and obedience. A general’s private wish to avoid combat changes nothing if the army cannot relocate or withdraw in order. The choice exists because the organization can execute it.

Withdrawal is not the same as collapse

Modern readers often hear “defend” as “remain where you are.” The surrounding passage makes that equation difficult. Li Jing has just described armies that preserve order while moving away. A unit can yield ground and still deny the pursuer a usable weakness.

He associates this capability with disciplined forces. Commands continue to work under pressure. Soldiers do not break ranks to seize an apparent prize. The commander can decide whether to follow, wait, or change direction. Such an army has more options than one driven by impulse.

The refusal to pursue is a particularly demanding test. A retreating enemy seems to offer profit, honor, and completion. Yet orderly banners may conceal a lure. Before chasing, the observer must decide whether the opponent has truly broken or is merely creating distance.

Non-engagement is therefore not empty time. During it, the army protects coherence, information, and the ability to act later. It may be avoiding a threat, but it is also preserving a condition the enemy has not yet disrupted.

The second half reverses the direction

Taizong next asks about the paired claim: why does unavoidable battle depend on the enemy? Li Jing again quotes Sunzi. Present a form and the enemy will follow it; offer an apparent advantage and the enemy will take it. While the enemy moves, one’s own side waits with its essentials intact.

The two answers point in opposite directions. When one does not want battle, one moves away from the enemy’s intended destination. When one wants to compel battle, one gives the enemy a destination that attracts it. In each case the contested issue is who chooses the place and time of contact.

Words such as “form” and “advantage” reveal the work in the second method. The commander creates something to which the enemy wants to respond. The enemy’s choices narrow, while one’s own force preserves its base. “Depends on the enemy” does not mean waiting passively for enemy aggression.

Nor do the paired clauses divide responsibility equally. The work of refusing battle is performed on one’s own disposition. The work of compelling battle is completed through movement that the enemy chooses to make. Li Jing assigns different actors to different verbs.

A dialogue built from older books

Li Weigong Wendui is framed as a conversation between Tang emperor Taizong and the general Li Jing. Scholars have long debated its authorship and date. It should not be treated as a verbatim transcript whose historical setting has been proven.

Its dialogue nevertheless performs a clear interpretive task. Taizong poses a difficulty. Li Jing connects a precedent to sentences from military classics. Taizong then isolates one half of Li Jing’s formula and asks for its meaning. Familiar maxims are placed back into a specific tactical problem.

Li Jing also draws from more than one text. The Sima Fa helps explain measured pursuit and orderly withdrawal; Sunzi helps explain the conditions of refusal and compulsion. The classics do not appear as ornaments. Their different statements are made to answer each other.

There is a later historical irony. Li Weigong Wendui, Sunzi, and the Sima Fa were all included in the Seven Military Classics under the Northern Song. A text in that later canon interprets two of its companions. That canonical arrangement postdates the Tang setting of the dialogue, so the two historical layers must remain distinct.

What fifty-seven characters do not promise

The excerpt does not say that refusing battle is always correct. Its opening explicitly preserves both non-engagement and unavoidable engagement. The commander still has to identify which situation is present.

It does not promise that any position can be held with a mark on the ground. The hyperbole concentrates attention on the enemy’s direction. Material strength, logistics, terrain, and the value of the objective remain necessary questions beyond these lines.

It also does not recommend flight. The preceding examples concern forces that retain order and deny the enemy an opening while withdrawing. A rout has already lost the control on which “depends on us” relies.

Finally, the passage does not guarantee that avoiding one engagement reduces every cost. Yielding one place may expose another. The quotation supplies a principle of agency, not a complete campaign plan or a moral verdict on either side.

Choosing the point of decision

Taizong sees opposing armies and assumes that the final step has arrived. Li Jing reopens the sequence. Even after contact, direction, distance, formation, and objective can still be changed. Attack is not the automatic consequence of sight.

The compact formula places preparation before desire. If non-engagement is to depend on us, our troops must be able to preserve order, change position, and distinguish a lure from a collapse. The decision not to fight begins before the words are spoken.

Read with its continuation, the passage offers a matched discipline. Avoid the point the enemy chooses; create a point the enemy will choose. One preserves freedom by declining an unfavorable meeting and constrains the opponent by arranging a favorable one.

What the dialogue distributes is not courage and cowardice. It distributes initiative. “Not fighting depends on us” names the work by which a commander keeps the place of decision from being handed to the enemy.

Source

Li Weigong Wendui, lower scroll, in the exchange beginning with two formations confronting one another. The Chinese was checked against the received text. A Japanese woodblock witness is Tō Taizong Li Weigong Wendui, upper, middle, and lower scrolls (1646), Waseda University Library, call number Bunko 31 E1919; the excerpt is on PDF page 39. Wang Huan’s corrected Hyōdai Bukei Shichisho Zenbun places the work in volume four.