Warring States strategist whose classmate 庞涓 had his kneecaps removed, the punishment that gave him his name. Serving Qi, he beat Pang's Wei army with the tactic 围魏救赵 and later at Maling.
Besieging Wei to rescue Zhao is one of Sun Bin's classic stratagems.
Tips
history
The idiom 田忌赛马 comes from him: to win a three-race bet for the Qi general 田忌, he matched Tian's worst horse against the king's best, then won the other two races. It means beating a stronger rival by clever matching.
memory
膑 is both the kneecap and the old punishment of removing it. For the bone, modern Chinese writes 髌骨, with 骨 'bone' in place of the flesh radical 月, so 膑 survives mostly in his name.
