Where is the essence of 36 meters?

The so-called "thirty-six strategies" is to describe many strategies, not all of them. However, some people have collected and listed all kinds of tricks circulated by the people, and compiled 36 items, such as "from the sea to the sky", "killing with a knife", "playing hard to get" and "attracting tigers out of the mountain", and listed "leaving is the best policy" as the last item. Even if it is 36 strokes, the statement is different.

"Thirty-six plans, walking is the best policy", and "Cold Zhai Night Talk" is "thirty-six plans, walking is the best policy". Although this is what Jing Wong said to Tan Daoji, it later formed an idiom, which means it is better to leave early.

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. Each scheme is basically named after a well-known idiom, which is easy to understand, easy to remember and easy to spread among the masses. 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. Divination was originally a superstitious activity, but judging from the reasoning and explanation of good and bad luck in the hexagrams of the Book of Changes, we can reflect the factors of simple materialism and dialectics through superstition. In military philosophy, the Book of Changes has a preliminary understanding of the social phenomenon of war. Military strategists in ancient China, such as Sun Wu, Sun Bin, Han Xin and Li Jing, were all proficient in the Book of Changes and used it to "change" soldiers militarily. 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.