169. Genchitaofu Baguazhang's Bingfa - 艮氣道福八卦掌の兵法 (3/4)

I've heard that someone is claiming that Sun Tzu' classic The Art of War is a book about peace and avoiding war. I have mixed emotions about the claim. It makes me wonder if that person has actually read the book - all 13 chapters. Because it is only in the first chapter that Sun Tzu cautions a ruler to reconsider. And that caution is based on the damage it could do to a king's country and people. Chapter two and onwards delves into the logistics and the mechinations of war, insofar that wars can be fought swiftly with the least amount of pain and suffering involved. The last two chapters deal with using fire and spying. Pause for a moment and think about it... These two chapters are last. And fire deals with the part of war glory-seekers don't want to accept. And that is this: When all else fails and you can't take the castle, burn it all down, regardless of who's left inside because compassion by the standards of war is about killing the few 'inside' so that the many 'outside' can live on. And then you have the chapter involving spies. Spies represent that, which is never acknowledged but can be the critical deciding factor in the outcome, of whether or not countries fight an actual outright war. Until then it is all incognito and secret. Martial arts is the same. Internal martial artists usually end up seeking the way of peace because internal methods are rarely just about having fights. While fights can seem glorious, they have a way of becoming a never-ending cycle of tit-for-tat. It never really solves the problem unless somebody is profiting from it. Fighters only ever see the next fight. Which may or may not be their next pay-cheque. There is more to martial arts than self-defence. It isn't even about being tactical. There is this part of it that only a person who's been there and done that, can grasp. To illustrate what I mean: There is a story that is famous amongst entrepreneurial groups regarding the begetting of money. Money is a little bit like butterflies and most butterfly catchers use a net to catch butterflies. While this image can look poetic, the truth is, after a while this way of catching butterflies can get exhausting. So rather than chasing butterflies hither and thither with a net, which is what hustling is, the smart entrepreneur will cultivate a garden that naturally attracts butterflies. Now up to this point the story for the entrepreneur ends. And ours continues. The thing about butterflies is, is that they lay eggs and those eggs turn into caterpillars. Nothing wrong with caterpillars except that those same butterflies tend to lay their eggs in places they shouldn't. Outright good old-fashioned war is like the gardener using pesticide over everything. Caterpillars die, the soil becomes toxic and eventually that toxicity builds up in people and so forth. So, in order to avoid this, war is conducted with chopsticks. The farmer searches under leaves and picks the caterpillars off as he finds them. Once he's got the caterpillar held between his chopsticks, he throws it over the fence onto his neighbour's garden. Over time neighbour's yield depletes while our gardener reaps in extra profits at the market. End of story. Done over a long enough period of time, our farmer may end up in a position where he can buy his neighbour's farm as an act of commercial compassion for his suffering neighbour.