Reading the Sima Fa · 02
What Was an Army Forbidden to Take in the Sima Fa?
The order does not begin with tactics. It names shrines, hunting, earthworks, walls, trees, animals, grain, and tools—things an advancing army is explicitly told not to violate, destroy, burn, cut, or seize.
A fresh translation
On entering the land of those held guilty, do not violate its spirits and shrines, and do not hunt in its fields.
Do not destroy its works of earth, burn its walls and houses, or cut down its trees.
Do not take its six kinds of livestock, its grain, or its implements.
Original text
入罪人之地，無暴神祇，無行田獵，
無毀土功，無燔牆屋，無伐林木，
無取六畜、禾黍、器械。
Words and terms
- “The land of those held guilty” (罪人之地)
The phrase belongs to the chapter’s stated justification for a punitive expedition. It records the voice of the order; it does not independently prove that the accusation was just. - Spirits and shrines (神祇)
The religious sites and powers associated with the invaded land. The prohibition places them outside permitted violence. - Works of earth (土功)
Constructed works involving soil and labor. The term is broader than a single kind of fortification. - Six kinds of livestock (六畜)
A conventional collective term for domestic animals. The line treats them as resources that must not be seized. - Implements (器械)
Utensils, equipment, and working tools. The word need not mean weapons here, especially because it follows livestock and grain.
A campaign order made from negative verbs
The passage is built from prohibitions. Do not violate. Do not hunt. Do not destroy. Do not burn. Do not cut. Do not take. The sequence matters because it defines an army’s conduct through actions that must be withheld, not merely through an end that must be achieved.
The list also moves across different kinds of value. Spirits and shrines belong to ritual life. Hunting grounds and trees belong to a landscape. Earthworks, walls, and houses are products of labor. Livestock, grain, and implements sustain households and work. The text does not collapse them into one vague word such as “property.” It names what armed movement could consume or ruin.
That concreteness prevents an easy moral summary. “Exercise restraint” would be shorter, but it would hide the choices the order anticipates. An army can cross a field without hunting in it. It can enter a settlement without burning its buildings. It can pass stores and tools without treating them as prizes. Each prohibition imagines an opportunity and then closes it.
The accused are not the whole population
The opening phrase deserves caution. The army enters “the land of those held guilty.” Earlier in the chapter, a ruler announces that a certain state has acted wrongly and calls other lords to assemble. The field order therefore follows a formal accusation.
Yet the objects protected by the order do not belong only to an accused ruler. Shrines, houses, trees, animals, crops, and tools are woven into the life of a much wider population. The grammar separates the alleged offense from permission to devastate everything found within the territory.
This distinction becomes clearer in the sentences that follow the quotation. Old people and children are to be escorted home without injury. Adults who do not resist are not to be treated as enemies. The wounded are to receive medicine and be sent back. The three quoted lines begin that movement by protecting places and means of subsistence before the order speaks directly about bodies.
No hunting in the fields
The ban on hunting can look minor beside burning houses or taking grain. In context, it is revealing. Hunting by an army is not merely recreation. It can scatter animals, trample cultivated ground, and turn the countryside into a storehouse for the force passing through it.
The wording does not tell us how every campaign supplied itself, and it should not be used as a report that all armies obeyed such a rule. It records a normative command. That difference is essential. A military classic can preserve an ideal of order without proving ordinary practice.
Still, an ideal stated in this form is historically informative. The writer knows that an army is tempted to obtain food and sport from land it does not own. The command addresses that temptation directly. It asks soldiers to recognize a field as someone else’s working environment, not simply as available terrain.
Walls, houses, and the labor inside them
“Do not destroy works of earth; do not burn walls and houses.” These clauses sit between the ban on hunting and the ban on cutting trees. The order is not limited to sacred places. It extends to built space.
The term “works of earth” should not be narrowed without evidence. It may include construction shaped from soil and organized labor. Walls and houses are named separately, which suggests that the line is casting a broad net over things people have made. Destruction is restricted even when those structures stand inside the territory named as guilty.
Fire receives its own verb. An advancing force could burn buildings quickly and leave damage that continued after the army moved on. By naming burning, the order treats that method as a foreseeable act requiring an explicit ban. The text is concerned not only with who is defeated but with what remains usable afterward.
Trees are not an incidental detail
Trees follow walls and houses. They may provide timber, fuel, shade, fruit, boundaries, or protection for soil. The three lines do not specify which use is foremost, so a careful reading should not choose one and pretend the text did.
What can be said is firmer: cutting trees is placed alongside damaging construction and taking subsistence goods. The landscape is not presented as empty material. An army is told to leave it standing.
This placement also broadens the meaning of restraint. A ban on harming noncombatants concerns immediate injury. A ban on cutting trees concerns resources whose loss may outlast the encounter. The order therefore reaches beyond the battle’s duration, even though it does not offer a theory of environmental protection in modern terms.
Livestock, grain, and implements form a household economy
The last line gathers three kinds of movable wealth. Livestock can be driven away. Grain can be carried or eaten. Implements can be reused by the army. All are tempting because they have immediate practical value.
They also matter together. Animals, stored crops, and tools enable people to eat, plant, transport, and work. Taking one category may damage the use of the others. The order does not explain this system, but its list catches several parts of it in a single prohibition.
“Implements” is especially easy to mistranslate as military equipment. Context argues for restraint. It comes after domestic animals and grain, within a passage protecting the invaded land’s material basis. Some implements might be weapons, but the word is not limited to them. “Tools and equipment” keeps the range open.
What these three lines do not prove
They do not prove that ancient armies consistently followed these rules. A prescriptive order tells us what conduct was demanded or idealized, not how often soldiers complied.
They do not establish that every expedition described as punitive was justified. The phrase “those held guilty” belongs to the command’s own framework. The quotation does not provide evidence for the accusation behind any particular campaign.
They do not amount to a complete law of war. The wider paragraph adds rules about people, resistance, injury, and return. Other chapters address different military problems. This excerpt is one bounded part of a longer statement.
Nor should the list be converted into a slogan for present disputes. Its value here is textual and historical: it records what one received military classic placed inside an army order, and it lets us see precisely which acts were named.
Victory is not permission to consume the route
The strongest feature of the passage is its inventory. Shrines are not to be violated. Fields are not to become hunting grounds. Construction is not to be destroyed, houses are not to be burned, trees are not to be felled, and the goods that sustain work are not to be taken.
Nothing in those commands denies that the chapter imagines armed force. The army has already been summoned. It is crossing into another territory. Restraint enters after mobilization, not instead of it.
That is why the three lines deserve to be read as military writing rather than detached ethical ornament. They define discipline at the moment when soldiers possess the means to do otherwise. In the Sima Fa’s order, entering enemy land does not make everything along the route available for use.
Source
Sima Fa (司馬法), “Foundations of Benevolence” (仁本), the opening three clauses of the army order proclaimed by the chief minister and officials. The wording was checked against the chapter transcription in the Chinese Text Project; that is a typeset text rather than a facsimile. A Japanese woodblock witness appears in Hyōdai Bukei Shichisho Zenbun, books 1–7, corrected by Wang Huan (Osaka: Bunkindō, 1846); the Sima Fa is book 3. Waseda University Library, call number イ13 00931.