Why Does the Three Strategies Ban Divination in the Army?

A fresh translation

Original text

Words and concepts

• 軍勢 (Junshi / “Military Dispositions”)
  The sentence is presented as a quotation from an earlier military authority. The title is part of the received text’s argument, not the name of the army being addressed.
• 巫祝 (wu zhu)
  Religious specialists associated with spirit-mediumship, prayer, invocation, or ritual service. The paired term should not be reduced to a single modern profession.
• 吏士 (lishi)
  Officers and soldiers, or military personnel across administrative and fighting ranks.
• 吉凶 (jixiong)
  Good and bad fortune. Here it concerns the expected outcome or auspiciousness of the army’s undertaking.

A prohibition placed inside military administration

The line belongs to the Middle Strategy, a compact discussion of political and military order. Its immediate neighborhood matters. The text has just demanded that commands be made clear and punishments be certain. It then cites Military Dispositions and excludes divination from the information offered to officers and soldiers. The ban therefore appears as a rule of organization, not as an isolated speculation about the supernatural.

This placement changes the question a reader should ask. The sentence is not primarily trying to prove that every ritual specialist is fraudulent. It asks what may be permitted to influence people who must act under a common command. A forecast of good fortune might encourage unauthorized confidence. A forecast of disaster might dissolve obedience before an order is tested. Either answer creates a voice beside the command structure.

The object of control is consequently not only a practice but also an audience. The specialists must not make inquiries or pronouncements “for officers and soldiers.” The rule attends to circulation: who is allowed to tell the army what kind of future it faces.

Why name both officers and soldiers?

The compound lishi reaches beyond the ordinary rank and file. Officials or officers are included with the troops. That detail prevents a simple picture in which educated commanders restrain the credulity of common soldiers. The prohibition covers military personnel more broadly.

A commander who privately consults a diviner could be affected as deeply as a soldier who hears an ominous answer in camp. The text does not describe a survey of belief, and it gives no episode in which a prediction caused a defeat. Its wording instead anticipates a structural risk: decisions and morale can be redirected by claims whose authority does not come from the announced order.

The paired audience also helps explain the absolute grammar. The line does not tell commanders to consult more carefully or to reject only unfavorable forecasts. It says that the act must not be performed for them. Favorable and unfavorable answers are treated alike because both can establish an alternative expectation around which people organize their conduct.

The sentence does not abolish uncertainty

Prohibiting a forecast does not make the future knowable. Weather can change, supplies can fail, allies can defect, and an opponent can act unexpectedly. Nothing in these two lines promises that clear command will remove those hazards.

The rule instead distinguishes uncertainty from a declaration about uncertainty. An army may not know what will happen. A divinatory answer converts that condition into a named fortune—good or bad—and gives the answer a speaker, an audience, and social consequences. Once heard, it can become part of the situation that commanders are trying to govern.

This is why the sentence is more exact than a broad rejection of “superstition.” Its concern is not every private hope, fear, dream, or ritual. It singles out specialists divining military fortune for personnel. The institutional setting supplies the boundary.

Competing speech in a camp

An army depends upon many kinds of speech: orders, reports, warnings, challenges, oaths, and signals. They are not interchangeable. A report may describe what scouts observed. An order states what an authorized superior requires. A prediction of fortune claims knowledge of an outcome that observation cannot yet confirm.

The Middle Strategy places great weight on the relation between words and consequences. Commands must be plain enough to follow, and punishments must not be uncertain. A prophecy entering that system can disturb both. If troops believe success is guaranteed, restraint may weaken. If they believe ruin is fixed, punishment may no longer deter them. In either case, the prediction changes how official words are received.

We should not turn this observation into a complete theory of ancient military psychology. The excerpt supplies no testimony from soldiers and no description of ritual in a particular campaign. It gives a prescription. Prescriptions reveal what an author considered dangerous or improper; they do not prove how often the danger occurred.

A narrow rule, not a history of religion

The terms wu and zhu carried long and varied histories. Their functions cannot be reconstructed from this sentence alone. Nor does the line establish that the society surrounding the text had abandoned sacrifice, omens, ancestral rites, or other forms of religious practice.

It is equally unsafe to translate the ban into a modern conflict between “science” and “religion.” Those categories do not map neatly onto the received vocabulary. The text does not contrast divination with statistical calculation or an experimental method. It contrasts a military order with an unauthorized way of assigning good or bad fortune to the army.

The narrow reading is historically stronger. Within the governed space of officers and soldiers, the author wants no ritual specialist producing a verdict about the campaign’s outcome. That claim can be understood without making the Three Strategies speak for every institution or belief of its world.

Borrowed authority inside the Three Strategies

The words are introduced with “Military Dispositions says.” This framing gives the ban the weight of an inherited maxim. The Three Strategies does not present the instruction as a sudden personal preference; it embeds it in a chain of military teaching.

At the same time, the quoted title does not provide a surviving independent witness that lets us reconstruct its original setting with confidence. The passage is evidence for how the received Three Strategies uses an attributed authority. It is not, by itself, proof of the date or authorship of every layer behind that attribution.

This distinction is useful because military classics often speak through named sayings, ancient rulers, or earlier books. Close reading should preserve those voices while separating the literary claim from conclusions that require external evidence.

What the two lines establish

They establish that the received Middle Strategy treats forecasts of an army’s fortune as a matter of discipline. They identify the prohibited specialists, the military audience, and the subject of the prohibited inquiry. They also place the rule beside clear commands and reliable penalties.

They do not tell us how the ban was enforced, whether a particular army obeyed it, or how ritual specialists answered. They do not prove disbelief in every omen. Most importantly, they do not promise victory to a commander who suppresses divination.

The passage’s sharper point is administrative. Uncertainty remains, but the army must not be divided by rival declarations of what fate has already decided. The future is left open; responsibility for present orders remains with human authority.

Source

Three Strategies (三略), Middle Strategy (中略), the Military Dispositions quotation following the rule on clear orders and certain punishments. The Chinese wording was checked against Wang Huan’s corrected Complete Text of the Seven Military Classics with Headings (標題武経七書全文), fascicle 6, published by Bunkindō in Osaka in Kōka 3 (1846), Waseda University Library, call number イ13 00931. The quotation is also present in the received Chinese text of the Middle Strategy.