36 meters from whose hand?

The original book "Thirty-six Plans" has no exact date and author. There are six sets of strategies in the book, which are victory strategy, enemy strategy, attack strategy, melee strategy, combination strategy and defeat strategy. Each set of rice is divided into six meters, a total of 36 meters.

The contents of every plan are mostly cunning plans of ancient military strategists. It can be said that it is a military book that brings together the "cunning ways" of military strategists and specializes in military strategy. Most of the explanations in Thirty-six Plans are based on the words in the Book of Changes. The Book of Changes was originally a divination book in the Yin and Zhou Dynasties. It consists of eight types: dry, Kun, truth, smoke, hurdle, reason, root and right, symbolizing the eight basic substances that make up the universe, namely, heaven, earth, thunder, wind, water, fire, mountain and ze. By overlapping and combining the eight diagrams, there are 64 individual hexagrams, and 384 hexagrams (chanting scriptures) have been introduced.

Thirty-six Strategies uses the theory of Yin and Yang in the Book of Changes to deduce the mutual transformation of opposites in the art of war, such as rigidity, strangeness, attack and defense, self-denial, reality, subject and object, and rest, so that each tactic contains the color of simple military dialectics.

Thirty-six Strategies first appeared in The Biography of Wang Jingze in the Southern Qi Dynasty, and it really accumulated into a book, probably in the Ming and Qing Dynasties. From a historical point of view, when the ancients talked about "36 schemes", they only used the number of 66 in the lunar calendar in Yin and Yang to describe scheming, not to say that there were only 36 schemes. In fact, in the history of war, the use of military strategy is varied and numerous. In this sense, the "thirty-six plans" are only a partial summary of past experience.