shih1 Chinese term meaning ‘strategic advantage’. Shih was the key and defining idea in the Militarist philosophers, later appropriated by some of the other classical schools, including the Legalists (Han Fei Tzu) and the Confucians (Hsün Tzu). Like ritual practices (li) and speaking (yen), shih is a level of discourse through which one actively cultivates the leverage and influence of one’s particular place. In the Military texts, the most familiar metaphor for shih is the taut trigger on the drawn crossbow, emphasizing advantageous position, timing, and precision. Shih (like immanental order generally) begins from the full consideration of the concrete detail. The business of war or effective government does not occur as some independent and isolated event, but unfolds within a broad field of unique natural, social, and political conditions proceeding according to a general pattern that can not only be anticipated but manipulated to one’s advantage. It is the changing configuration of these specific conditions that determines one’s place and one’s influence at any point in time, and gives one a defining disposition. Shih includes intangible forces such as morale, opportunity, timing, psychology, and logistics. See also CHINESE LEGALISM , CONFUCIANIS. R.P.P. & R.T.A. shih2, Chinese term meaning ‘scholar-knight’ and ‘service’. In the service of the rulers of the ‘central states’ of preimperial China, shih were a lower echelon of the official nobility responsible for both warfare and matters at court, including official documentation, ritual protocol, and law. Most of the early philosophers, trained in the ‘six arts’ of rites, music, archery, charioteering, writing, and counting, belonged to this stratum. Without hereditary position, they lived by their wits and their professional skills, and were responsible for both the intellectual vigor and the enormous social mobility of Warring States China (403–221 B.C.). See also SHEN PU-HAI. R.P.P. & R.T.A.