Shíyī jiā zhù Sūnzǐ (Mèngshì zhù) 十一家註孫子(孟氏注)
The Eleven-Commentator Annotated Sūn-zǐ (Mèng’s Commentary stratum) canonical text by 孫武 (Sūn Wǔ, 6th–early 5th c. BCE traditional, with the received text more probably late 5th – early 3rd c. BCE; 撰); commentary by 孟氏 (Mèngshì, 梁, 注)
About the work
A 13-篇 edition of the Sūnzǐ bīngfǎ 孫子兵法 with commentary attributed to the Liáng-dynasty annotator Mèngshì 孟氏, extracted from the standard late-Northern-Sòng 《十一家注孫子》 (Shíyī jiā zhù Sūnzǐ) compilation of Jí Tiānbǎo 吉天保 (late 11th c.). The base text (the Sūnzǐ itself) is catalogued separately as KR3b0003; the present file isolates the Mèngshì stratum of commentary so that one of the historically obscurer of the eleven traditional annotators can be read on its own. The other ten commentators (Cáo Cāo 曹操, Lǐ Quán 李筌, Dù Mù 杜牧, Méi Yáochén 梅堯臣, Wáng Xī 王晳, Hé Yánxī 何延錫, Chén Hào 陳皞, Jiǎ Lín 賈林, Dù Yòu 杜佑, Zhāng Yù 張預) are available in their own Shíyī jiā extractions in the same CHANT-derived series.
Abstract
The Sūnzǐ bīngfǎ itself, the foundational Chinese military classic, is conventionally ascribed to Sūn Wǔ 孫武, a strategist active in the state of Wú in the late 6th c. BCE; modern critical scholarship (Wilkinson 2022; Mair 2007) places the received form of the text in the late 4th–early 3rd c. BCE, with substantial elements probably originating in 5th-c. BCE military culture. The Yínquèshān 銀雀山 bamboo-strip find (1972) provides a late-Western-Hàn version that closely matches the transmitted text.
The commentary tradition begins with Cáo Cāo 曹操 in the late Eastern Hàn / early Three-Kingdoms period and continues unbroken to the present. Mèngshì 孟氏 is conventionally placed in the Liáng 梁 (502–557) on the basis of the ordering used in the Shíyī jiā edition; nothing else is reliably known of him — no personal name, no office, no native place. The Mèng commentary, where it survives, tends toward the moralizing-political end of the spectrum (e.g. on 《計篇》‘s dào it amplifies “dào, 謂道之以政令, 齊之以禮教, 故能化服士民, 與上下同心也*”), in contrast with Cáo Cāo’s terse strategic glosses or Méi Yáochén’s literary readings.
The bibliographic record of the Shíyī jiā edition itself: first compiled by Jí Tiānbǎo c. late 11th c.; the standard surviving witness is the Sòng kèběn 宋刻本 reproduced in facsimile by Zhōnghuá 中華 (Shanghai 1961) as Sòngběn Shíyī jiā zhù Sūnzǐ 宋本十一家注孫子. A modern critical edition with apparatus is Sūnzǐ bīngfǎ xīnzhù 孫子兵法新注 (Zhōnghuá 1977), prepared by the PLA Military Sciences Academy Sūnzǐ annotation group, using the Sòng eleven-commentator text as base and the Yínquèshān bamboo strips as principal collation source.
Translations and research
- Wilkinson, Endymion. Chinese History: A New Manual (6th edn, 2022), §27.1 (military classics), §59.7 (Yín-què-shān strip-texts) — standard English-language framing of Sūn-zǐ textual history.
- Mair, Victor H. 2007. The Art of War: Sun Zi’s Military Methods. Columbia U.P. — translation with introduction situating the textual history.
- Sawyer, Ralph D. 1993. The Seven Military Classics of Ancient China. Westview. — includes the Sūn-zǐ with extensive notes on the commentary tradition.
- Boorman, Scott. 2024. Three Faces of Sun Tzu. CUP. — book-length study of the Sūn-zǐ across its three “faces” (early Chinese warfare; trans-historical military strategy; broader conflict applications).
- Sūn-zǐ bīng-fǎ xīn-zhù 孫子兵法新注. PLA Military Sciences Academy. Zhōng-huá, 1977. — modern critical edition based on Sòng Shí-yī jiā + Yín-què-shān strips.
- For the Mèng-shì commentary specifically: no monographic study located; treated only in passing in surveys of the Sūn-zǐ commentary tradition.
Other points of interest
The Sìkù editors notoriously refused to admit multiple commented editions of any Seven Military Classic, on the grounds that the existing commentaries were “scattered and contradictory” and that what officers needed for the military exams was an uncluttered text (Wilkinson, §27.1). The Shíyī jiā edition, the principal pre-modern critical apparatus on the Sūnzǐ, was therefore not preserved in the SKQS, and the present CHANT-corpus extraction is one of the principal modern channels for reading it.