Pairs of Opposites

Opposite pairs are groups of two items which have meaning that is opposite, like regular and irregular, front and back, and so on. This must be related to the yin-yang principle of ancient China, which stems from roughly the same era. Yin and yang describes how seemingly opposite or contrary forces may actually be complementary, interconnected, and interdependent in the natural world, and how they may give rise to each other as they interrelate to one another. (source: Wikipedia).

We scanned the first six chapters of "the Art of War" to find pairs of opposites. Below you see a list of what we found.

• Life and death
• night and day, cold and heat, times and seasons
• great and small; danger and security; open ground and narrow passes
• Deception, see the figure with the final mind map detail in Conditional Statements pattern for paragraph 18.

• intact, destroy

• weak and strong
• direct and indirect
• heaven and earth
• sun and moon
• strength and weakness

• weak points and strong
• at ease and harass
• supplied with food and starve
• encamped and move
• attack and defend
• concentrate and divide
• whole and separate parts
• front and rear, left and right, reinforce and weaken
• avoid strong and strike weak