exhaustible, must therefore be susceptible of treatment in

a great variety of ways. 1

I. 7% fig Ts‘ao Ts‘ao or 7% IA Ts‘ao Kung, afterwards known as 5% 'fi’i‘ Wei Wu Ti [A.D. 155—220]. There

is hardly any room for doubt that the earliest commentary on Sun Tzu actually came from the pen of this extra- ordinary man, whose biography in the Sam K210 C/zi/zg reads like a romance. One of the greatest military geniuses. that the world has seen, and Napoleonic in the scale of his operations, he was especially famed for the marvellous rapidity of his marches, which has found expression in the line 3% fig 7% fig 3% “Talk of Ts‘ao Ts‘ao, and Ts‘ao Ts‘ao will appear.” Ou-yang Hsiu says of him that he was a great captain who “measured his strength against Tung Cho, Lij Pu and the two Yiian, father and son, and vanquished them all; whereupon he divided the Empire of Han with Wu and Shu, and made himself king. It is recorded that whenever a council of war was held by Wei on the eve of a far-reaching campaign, he had all his calculations ready; those generals who made use of ‘them did not lose one battle in ten; those who ran counter to them in any particular saw their armies incontinently beaten and put to flight.”3 Ts‘ao Kung’s notes on Sun Tzu, models of austere brevity, are so thoroughly charac— teristic of the stern commander known to history, that it is hard indeed to conceive of them as the work of a mere lz'ttérateur. Sometimes, indeed, owing to extreme com-