The 33 Strategies of War (80 page)

The priest Ryokan...asked Zen master Bukkan...for an explanation of the four Dharma-worlds....
[
Bukkan
]
said: "To explain the four Dharma-worlds should not need a lot of chatter." He filled a white tea cup with tea, drank it up, and smashed the cup to pieces right in front of the priest, saying, "Have you got it?" The priest said: "Thanks to your here-and-now teaching, I have penetrated right into the realm of Principle and Event."

--Trevor Leggett,
Samurai Zen: The Warrior Koans
(1985)

THE MASTERMIND

In 1498 the twenty-nine-year-old Niccolo Machiavelli was appointed secretary of Florence's Second Chancery, which managed the city's foreign affairs. The choice was unusual: Machiavelli was of relatively low birth, had no experience in politics, and lacked a law degree or other professional qualification. He had a contact in the Florentine government, however, who knew him personally and saw great potential in him. And indeed, over the next few years, Machiavelli stood out from his colleagues in the Chancery for his tireless energy, his incisive reports on political matters, and his excellent advice to ambassadors and ministers. He won prestigious assignments, traveling around Europe on diplomatic missions--to various parts of northern Italy to meet with Cesare Borgia, to ferret out that ruthless statesman's intentions on Florence; to France to meet with King Louis XII; to Rome to confer with Pope Julius II. He seemed to be at the start of a brilliant career.

Not all was well, however, in Machiavelli's professional life. He complained to his friends about the Chancery's low pay; he also described doing all the hard work in various negotiations, only to see some powerful senior minister brought on board at the last moment to finish the job and take the credit. Many above him, he said, were stupid and lazy, appointed to their positions by virtue of birth and connections. He was developing the art of dealing with these men, he told his friends, finding a way to use them instead of being used.

Before Machiavelli's arrival in the Chancery, Florence had been ruled by the Medici family, who, however, had been unseated in 1494, when the city became a republic. In 1512, Pope Julius II financed an army to take Florence by force, overthrow the republic, and restore the Medicis to power. The plan succeeded, and the Medicis took control, well in Julius's debt. A few weeks later, Machiavelli was sent to prison, vaguely implicated in a conspiracy against the Medicis. He was tortured but refused to talk, whether about his own involvement or that of others. Released from prison in March 1513, he retired in disgrace to a small farm owned by his family a few miles outside Florence.

Machiavelli had a close friend in a man called Francesco Vettori, who had managed to survive the change in government and to ingratiate himself with the Medicis. In the spring of 1513, Vettori began to receive letters in which Machiavelli described his new life. At night he would shut himself up in his study and converse in his mind with great figures in history, trying to uncover the secrets of their power. He wanted to distill the many things he himself had learned about politics and statecraft. And, he wrote to Vettori, he was writing a little pamphlet called
De principatibus
--later titled
The Prince
--"where I dive as deep as I can into ideas about this subject, discussing the nature of princely rule, what forms it takes, how these are acquired, how they are maintained, how they are lost." The knowledge and advice imparted in this pamphlet would be more valuable to a prince than the largest army--perhaps Vettori could show it to one of the Medicis, to whom Machiavelli would gladly dedicate the work? It could be of great use to this family of "new princes." It could also revive Machiavelli's career, for he was despondent at his isolation from politics.

Vettori passed the essay along to Lorenzo de' Medici, who accepted it with much less interest than he did two hunting dogs given to him at the same time. Actually,
The Prince
perplexed even Vettori: its advice was sometimes starkly violent and amoral, yet its language was quite dispassionate and matter-of-fact--a strange and uncommon mix. The author wrote the truth, but a little too boldly. Machiavelli also sent the manuscript to other friends, who were equally unsure what to make of it. Perhaps it was intended as satire? Machiavelli's disdain for aristocrats with power but no brains was well known to his circle.

Soon Machiavelli wrote another book, later known as
The Discourses
, a distillation of his talks with friends since his fall from grace. A series of meditations on politics, the book contained some of the same stark advice as the earlier work but was more geared toward the constitution of a republic than to the actions of a single prince.

Even more foolish is one who clings to words and phrases and thus tries to achieve understanding. It is like trying to strike the moon with a stick, or scratching a shoe because there is an itchy spot on the foot. It has nothing to do with the Truth.

Z
EN
M
ASTER
M
UMON
, 1183-1260

Over the next few years, Machiavelli slowly returned to favor and was allowed to participate in Florentine affairs. He wrote a play,
Mandragola
, which, though scandalous, was admired by the pope and staged at the Vatican; he was also commissioned to write a history of Florence.
The Prince
and
The Discourses
remained unpublished, but they circulated in manuscript among the leaders and politicians of Italy. Their audience was small, and when Machiavelli died in 1527, the former secretary to the republic seemed destined to return to the obscurity from which he came.

After Machiavelli's death, however, those two unpublished works of his began to circulate outside Italy. In 1529, Thomas Cromwell, the crafty minister to Henry VIII of England, somehow got hold of a copy of
The Prince
and, unlike the flightier Lorenzo de' Medici, read it closely and carefully. To him the book's historical anecdotes made for a lively and entertaining read. The plain language was not bizarre but refreshing. Most important, the amoral advice was in fact indispensable: the writer explained not only what a leader had to do to hold on to power but how to present his actions to the public. Cromwell could not help but adapt Machiavelli's counsel in his advice to the king.

Published in several languages in the decades after Machiavelli's death,
The Prince
slowly spread far and wide. As the centuries passed, it took on a life of its own, in fact a double life: widely condemned as amoral, yet avidly read in private by great political figures down the ages. The French minister Cardinal Richelieu made it a kind of political bible. Napoleon consulted it often. The American president John Adams kept it by his bedside. With the help of Voltaire, the Prussian king Frederick the Great wrote a tract called
The Anti-Machiavel
, yet he shamelessly practiced many of Machiavelli's ideas to the letter.

As Machiavelli's books reached larger audiences, his influence extended beyond politics. Philosophers from Bacon to Hegel found in his writings confirmation for many of their own theories. Romantic poets such as Lord Byron admired the energy of his spirit. In Italy, Ireland, and Russia, young revolutionaries discovered in
The Discourses
an inspiring call to arms and a blueprint for a future society.

Over the centuries millions upon millions of readers have used Machiavelli's books for invaluable advice on power. But could it possibly be the opposite--that it is Machiavelli who has been using his readers? Scattered through his writings and through his letters to his friends, some of them uncovered centuries after his death, are signs that he pondered deeply the strategy of writing itself and the power he could wield after his death by infiltrating his ideas
indirectly
and
deeply
into his readers' minds, transforming them into unwitting disciples of his amoral philosophy.

Yoriyasu was a swaggering and aggressive samurai.... In the spring of 1341 he was transferred from Kofu to Kamakura, where he visited Master Toden, the 45th teacher at Kenchoji, to ask about Zen. The teacher said, "It is to manifest directly the Great Action in the hundred concerns of life. When it is loyalty as a samurai, it is the loyalty of Zen. 'Loyalty' is written with the Chinese character made up of 'centre' and 'heart,' so it means the lord in the centre of the man. There must be no wrong passions. But when this old priest looks at the samurai today, there are some whose heart centre leans towards name and money, and others where it is towards wine and lust, and with others it is inclined towards power and bravado. They are all on those slopes, and cannot have a centred heart; how could they have loyalty to the state? If you, Sir, wish to practise Zen, first of all practise loyalty and do not slip into wrong desires." The warrior said, "Our loyalty is direct Great Action on the battlefield. What need have we for sermons from a priest?" The teacher replied, "You, Sir, are a hero in strife, I am a gentleman of peace--we can have nothing to say to each other." The warrior then drew his sword and said, "Loyalty is in the hero's sword, and if you do not know
this,
you should not talk of loyalty." The teacher replied, "This old priest has the treasure sword of the Diamond King, and if you do not know it, you should not talk of the source of loyalty." The samurai said, "Loyalty of your Diamond Sword--what is the use of that sort of thing in actual fighting?" The teacher jumped forward and gave one Katzu! shout, giving the samurai such a shock that he lost consciousness. After some time the teacher shouted again and the samurai at once recovered. The teacher said, "The loyalty in the hero's sword, where is it? Speak!" The samurai was over-awed; he apologized and took his departure.

S
AMURAI
Z
EN
: T
HE
W
ARRIOR
K
OANS
,
T
REVOR
L
EGGETT
, 1985

Interpretation

Once retired to his farm, Machiavelli had the requisite time and distance to think deeply about those matters that concerned him most. First, he slowly formulated the political philosophy that had long been brewing in his mind. To Machiavelli the ultimate good was a world of dynamic change in which cities or republics were reordering and revitalizing themselves in perpetual motion. The greatest evil was stagnation and complacency. The agents of healthy change were what he called "new princes"--young, ambitious people, part lion, part fox, conscious or unconscious enemies of the established order. Second, Machiavelli analyzed the process by which new princes rose to the heights of power and, often, fell from it. Certain patterns were clear: the need to manage appearances, to play upon people's belief systems, and sometimes to take decidedly amoral action.

Machiavelli craved the power to spread his ideas and advice. Denied this power through politics, he set out to win it through books: he would convert readers to his cause, and
they
would spread his ideas, witting or unwitting carriers. Machiavelli knew that the powerful are often reluctant to take advice, particularly from someone apparently beneath them. He also knew that many of those not in power might be frightened by the dangerous aspects of his philosophy--that many readers would be attracted and repelled at the same time. (The powerless want power but are afraid of what they might have to do to get it.) To win over the resistant and ambivalent, Machiavelli's books would have to be strategic, indirect and crafty. So he devised unconventional rhetorical tactics to penetrate deep behind his readers' defenses.

First, he filled his books with indispensable advice--practical ideas on how to get power, stay in power, protect one's power. That draws in readers of all kinds, for all of us think first of our own self-interest. Also, no matter how much a reader resists, he or she realizes that ignoring this book and its ideas might be dangerous.

Next, Machiavelli stitched historical anecdotes throughout his writing to illustrate his ideas. People like to be shown ways to fancy themselves modern Caesars or Medicis, and they like to be entertained by a good story; and a mind captivated by a story is relatively undefended and open to suggestion. Readers barely notice that in reading these stories--or, rather, in reading Machiavelli's cleverly altered versions of them--they are absorbing ideas. Machiavelli also quoted classical writers, adjusting the quotations to suit his purposes. His dangerous counsels and ideas would be easier to accept if they seemed to be emerging from the mouth of a Livy or a Tacitus.

Finally, Machiavelli used stark, unadorned language to give his writing movement. Instead of finding their minds slowing and stopping, his readers are infected with the desire to go beyond thought and take action. His advice is often expressed in violent terms, but this works to rouse his readers from their stupor. It also appeals to the young, the most fertile ground from which new princes grow. He left his writing open-ended, never telling people exactly what to do. They must use their own ideas and experiences with power to fill in his writing, becoming complicit partners in the text. Through these various devices, Machiavelli gained power over his readers while disguising the nature of his manipulations. It is hard to resist what you cannot see.