The Study On Wujing Zongyao

Wujing Zongyao is the first existing book on the art of war which is called "Wujing", it’s also the oldest one of the existing large-scale military books edited by the government. Northern Song Dynasty emperor Renzong ordered Zeng Gongliang, Ding Du and other officials to compile this book in order to meet the military struggle situation of that time. The book is comprehensive and has a high status in history. The authors fetched much classical information from ancient military books and listed lots of past dynasties classic battles. In addition, this book involved border military geography and horoscope. Both the book’s format and contents are learned by many later military writings. This book not only relates to ancient military, but also relates to ancient history, geography, science, technology, and so on. This article focuses on the literature research of Wujing Zongyao, and to find something important in it’s military thought, value, et al. In summary, I found that the differences between different versions of this book are not obvious, but readers should pay attention to the differences of the words, such as the lacks of character and sentences, paragraphs disorder, large gaps or derivatives, et al. In military theory, this book reflects Zeng Gongliang’s viewpoint of "benevolence and loyalty oriented, tactics for uses", and emphasizes the importance of generals, military training and military discipline. Generally speaking, this book reflects the Song Dynasty’s defense strategy in military, but lacks of some strong positive and enterprising spirits. No wonder the Qing Dynasty’s compilers of Si-ku Quan-shu evaluated it as "Renzong is a virtuous but conservative Emperor, Gongliang and other compilers just to assist and support peace". Wujing Zongyao preserve a large number of military literature in Song Dynasty, it also has important reference value on military science research and literature research. Its novel style, rich content, deeply influenced the later military books’compilation.