In the practical art of war, the best thing of all is to take the enemy's country whole and intact; to shatter and destroy it is not so good.

The finding of Sun Bin's work is considered to be extremely important both because of Sun Bin's relationship to Sun Tzu and because of the work's addition to the body of military thought in late Chinese antiquity. Traditionalists attribute the authorship of The Art of War to the historical figure Sun Wu who is chronicled in the Records of the Grand Historian and the Spring and Autumn Annals. In 1972 scholars uncovered a collection of ancient texts written on unusually well-preserved bamboo slips.

His work continues to influence both Asian and Western culture and politics. Traditional accounts state that his descendant Sun Bin also wrote a treatise on military tactics titled Sun Bin's Art of War. Both Sun Wu and Sun Bin were referred to as Sun Tzu in classical Chinese writings and some historians believed that Sun Wu was in fact Sun Bin until Sun Bin's own treatise was discovered in 1972.