Part four in a series. Fourteen sacred texts, seven traditions, seven ITIL guiding principles, and one ITIL trainer well aware of how this might land.
Of all the pairings this series has attempted, this is the most fraught. Machiavelli and Sun Tzu had the courtesy of being long dead and broadly secular. The fourteen philosophers from a Monty Python song were chosen for their rhymes, not for what they wrote, and the comedic source meant the comparison itself could carry a wink. Sacred texts of living traditions are different. Billions of people read these books not as historical artifacts or strategic manuals but as the living word of God, the path to liberation, the foundation of duty, or the script for daily prayer. To compare them with anything, let alone a 21st-century IT service management framework, requires care.
So let me say what I am not arguing. I am not claiming these traditions are equivalent. I am not claiming ITIL captures their depth. I am not claiming the parallels I draw exhaust what these texts mean. I am not claiming the religions converge on a single underlying truth, though some readers may think so. What I am saying is more modest. When seven mature comparative frameworks for ordering complex human activity are written down over two and a half millennia and across seven civilizations, certain structural patterns recur. ITIL’s guiding principles are a recent attempt to articulate those patterns. The parallels in this essay are partial, structural, and superficial, offered in the spirit of comparative inquiry rather than theological synthesis.
I should also clarify where my standing comes from and where it does not. I attended Christian schools through university. I have read the Bible carefully, and its lessons continue to influence my thinking even though I have been agnostic for many decades. The thirteen other texts in this essay are known to me only by reputation: the Catechism of the Catholic Church, the Qur’an, the Hadith, the Vedas, the Bhagavad Gita, the Tripitaka, the Dhammapada, the Tao Te Ching, the Analects, the Guru Granth Sahib, the Dasam Granth, the Torah read as Jewish scripture rather than as the Christian Old Testament, and the Talmud. As with the Philosophers piece earlier in this series, I asked Claude (the AI assistant) to find parallels and summarize each text’s relevant teaching in language a service manager could use. What follows is a curated version of that work. The mapping is the AI’s; the prose, the curation, and any errors are mine. The audacity of the project is mine alone.
The ITIL guiding principles (Focus on Value, Start Where You Are, Progress Iteratively with Feedback, Collaborate and Promote Visibility, Think and Work Holistically, Keep It Simple and Practical, and Optimize and Automate) have remained unchanged from ITIL 4 (2019) to ITIL 5 (2026). Here is how fourteen sacred texts, drawn from seven of the world’s great religious traditions, illuminate and offer valuable perspectives on each principle.
1. Focus on Value
ITIL: Every activity must link back to stakeholder value
ITIL’s first guiding principle holds that every activity an organization undertakes should map back to value for the organization, its customers, and its stakeholders. Value is subjective, defined by the consumer, and must be continuously understood and validated.
The Bhagavad Gita on action without attachment to fruits
On the eve of battle, Krishna teaches Arjuna that one must act according to dharma, one’s proper role, while renouncing attachment to the fruits of action. The reward, Krishna instructs, lies in the rightness of the action itself, not in its outcome. Read this through the lens of service management, and a profound reframing emerges. The service team that obsesses over its own metrics (tickets closed, response times met, deployments shipped) and forgets the value those metrics were meant to serve has confused fruits with action. The Gita’s instruction is to focus on doing the right work, in alignment with the larger purpose, and to let the metrics follow. Krishna’s framing also addresses an uncomfortable truth: many of the things organizations call “value” are actually fruits, the visible outputs that flatter our self-conception of contribution.
The Bible on where treasure lies
The Sermon on the Mount offers a famous Christian counterpart: “Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.” Jesus makes a claim about identifying value through observation. You can tell what an organization truly values not by listening to its mission statement but by looking at where it invests its time, money, and attention. The same test, when applied to an IT department, is uncomfortably revealing. Many service organizations treasure operational firefighting, vendor management, and audit preparation, regardless of what their charter claims. The Bible’s instruction is not to pretend otherwise but to align treasure with stated values, which usually requires shifting where time and money go before those values can be plausibly claimed.
What a service manager takes from both
The Bhagavad Gita and the Bible converge on a single warning: value is not what you say it is, nor is it what your immediate metrics measure. The Gita asks you to detach from the fruits and focus on the right action. The Bible asks you to look honestly at what you truly treasure. ITIL’s framing of value as subjective and consumer-defined sits in the same territory. Both sacred texts add a discipline that ITIL alone may not enforce: regularly check whether what you are doing aligns with what you claim to value.
2. Start Where You Are
ITIL: Assess the current state honestly before building something new
ITIL’s second principle warns against the temptation to rebuild from scratch. Assess existing services, processes, people, and tools objectively, then build on what is already there.
The Torah on the people in the wilderness
The Hebrew Bible’s account of the Exodus is, among other things, a sustained meditation on starting where you are. The Israelites do not begin as a perfect people in a perfect place. They begin enslaved in Egypt, then wander, then encamp, then resettle, always with the people who actually show up. Moses receives the law not for an idealized congregation but for the mixed multitude before him, with all its grievances, golden calves, and partial obedience. The Torah’s pragmatism is striking: the covenant is made with this generation, in this place, with these capabilities. The instruction at Sinai is not “wait until conditions improve”; it is “today, if you hear his voice.” Apply this to organizational change. Most transformations fail because they are designed for the organization leadership wishes existed, not the one that actually shows up for the all-hands meeting.
The Tao Te Ching on the journey of a thousand miles
Lao Tzu’s most quoted line in modern leadership literature is that the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. The full instruction is more demanding than the cliche suggests. The step must begin where you actually stand, with the legs you have, on the ground that is there. The Tao Te Ching is suspicious of grand designs, preferring small movements that work with the grain of what is. Wu wei, often translated as “non-action” but better understood as “action without forcing,” is the discipline of working with existing momentum rather than against it. For an IT leader, this is a case for brownfield over greenfield, for incremental migration over big-bang replacement, and for accepting that the current state is, in some real sense, a coherent equilibrium that deserves to be understood before it is disturbed.
What a service manager takes from both
The Torah and the Tao Te Ching share a deep distrust of the leader who insists on starting over. The Torah grounds the work in covenant with the people present. The Tao Te Ching grounds it in alignment with the actual situation. ITIL’s “Start Where You Are” is a less dramatic restatement of the same instruction. Both texts also share an understanding of the principle alone may not convey: starting where you are is harder than it sounds because the temptation to start where you wish you were is constant.
3. Progress Iteratively with Feedback
ITIL: Break work into manageable iterations and use feedback to stay aligned
ITIL’s third principle advises practitioners to break large initiatives into manageable iterations and to use feedback loops to ensure each step remains aligned with evolving needs and changing circumstances.
The Talmud on argument across the centuries
The Talmud is, among many other things, the most thoroughly iterative document in the world’s religious literature. Its method is not exposition but argument: a verse from the Mishnah, a commentary from a sage, a counter-commentary from a later sage, a third opinion from a contemporary, an objection, a refinement, and a return to the original question with the benefit of the intervening discussion. Centuries of feedback loops are recorded on the same page. The discipline is not to settle the argument but to preserve it productively, so that each generation inherits both the question and the cumulative refinement of how it has been thought about. ITIL’s iterative loops, in which each cycle of work produces feedback that reshapes the next, look modest beside this. The Talmudic insight an IT organization most needs is structural: iteration should be visible, recorded, and inheritable, so that the next team does not have to relitigate the question from scratch.
The Hadith on isnad and the verification chain
The Hadith literature, second in authority only to the Qur’an in Sunni Islam, rests on a remarkable verification methodology. Each hadith is transmitted with its isnad, the chain of narrators stretching back to the Prophet, and the reliability of the report is judged by the reliability of the chain. The science of hadith criticism developed elaborate categories for evaluating each link. The result is a tradition that takes seriously how knowledge survives revision and transmission. Apply this to an IT organization. How many of the architectural decisions in your environment can be traced to their original justification? How many of the alert thresholds, runbooks, and deployment rituals can name their isnad? When the chain is broken, the practice continues without anyone able to say why, which is functionally identical to having no practice at all. The discipline of the Hadith is to make the chain visible.
What a service manager takes from both
Both traditions treat iteration as more than rapid feedback cycles. They treat it as the deliberate preservation of a long argument, with each round visible to the next and each transmission accompanied by its provenance. ITIL’s iterative loops will work. The Talmud and the Hadith suggest they will work much better if the records of past iterations remain accessible and intelligible to those doing the next iteration.
4. Collaborate and Promote Visibility
ITIL: Information should flow openly and silos should fall
ITIL’s fourth principle promotes open information sharing, cross-functional collaboration, and the elimination of hidden agendas.
The Qur’an on the ummah and the public rhythm of obligation
The Qur’an’s vision of religious life is profoundly communal and public. The five daily prayers (salat) are performed in a coordinated rhythm around the world. The annual pilgrimage to Mecca (hajj) brings the global community together in one place. The fast of Ramadan synchronizes the experience of hunger and reflection. The ummah, the global Muslim community, is not an abstraction but a lived practice of visible, coordinated obligation. Collaboration in this tradition is not optional; it is constitutive of religious life. Apply this to an IT organization. The teams that share a public rhythm (a daily standup, a weekly review, a quarterly demo) are doing something the Qur’an would recognize: making the obligation visible and synchronizing participation. The teams that work in private, on their own schedules, with no shared cadence, may be efficient locally but dysfunctional globally.
The Guru Granth Sahib on sangat, langar, and the egalitarian assembly
Sikhism’s central scripture is itself an act of radical visibility. The Guru Granth Sahib contains hymns from Sikh Gurus and from Hindu and Muslim saints, deliberately incorporating voices from other traditions into the foundational text. The lived practice continues this commitment. Sangat, the congregation, sits together regardless of social rank. Langar, the communal meal in every gurdwara, is served free to anyone who walks in, of any religion, with everyone sitting together on the floor as equals. The architectural choices are themselves arguments for collaboration: no internal hierarchies of access, no hidden rooms, the scripture itself open and present. For an IT organization, the Sikh question is uncomfortably direct. Is your information actually open, or is it open in principle and gated in practice? Who in your organization has private knowledge that the rest cannot access? What would a langar version of your service management look like?
What a service manager takes from both
The Qur’an and the Guru Granth Sahib both treat collaboration as something that must be made visible to be real. The Qur’an embeds it in the rhythm of obligation. The Guru Granth Sahib embeds it in the architecture of practice. ITIL’s call to eliminate silos and share information openly is a partial restatement of what these traditions have lived for centuries. The deeper instruction in both is that visibility is a structural property, not a cultural aspiration. You build it into the architecture, or you do not have it.
5. Think and Work Holistically
ITIL: No service stands alone
ITIL’s fifth principle holds that no service exists in isolation. Results emerge from integrating multiple dimensions: people, technology, partners, and processes.
The Vedas on Brahman and the unity beneath plurality
The Vedas, the oldest layer of Hindu scripture, articulate a cosmology in which Brahman, the ultimate reality, underlies and unifies the world’s apparent diversity. The Upanishads, the philosophical capstone of the Vedic corpus, develop this theme: Atman, the self, is not separate from Brahman but, properly understood, one with it. The cosmic order, rita, is not a set of rules imposed on chaos but the inherent pattern by which things actually fit together. For a service manager, the Vedic instruction is to look beneath the visible parts of the system to the underlying unity. The four dimensions of service management are not independent variables to be optimized in turn. They are aspects of a single system that must be coherent at every level. A change in one is a change in all, whether acknowledged or not.
The Analects on li and the relational whole
Confucius approaches holism through relationships rather than cosmology. The Analects focus on li, often translated as “ritual propriety” but better understood as the proper conduct of one in their place relative to others. The ruler relates to the minister, the minister to the people, the parent to the child, and the elder to the younger. Each relationship calibrates the others. Acting rightly in any one relationship requires understanding how it fits with the others. In Confucius’s account, the gentleman cultivates harmony across all these dimensions at once. For an IT organization, Confucius’s instruction is to think in relationships rather than functions. The platform team’s job is not “platform” in isolation. It is the platform team in proper relation to the application teams, the security team, the business stakeholders, and the customers. The right action depends on which relationship is being addressed.
What a service manager takes from both
The Vedas and the Analects approach holism from opposite ends. The Vedas start at the cosmic top and show how unity descends into apparent diversity. The Analects start at the relational ground and show how harmony rises through the proper conduct of each connection. ITIL’s four dimensions of service management sit somewhere between these two articulations and benefit from both. The Vedic question is what underlying unity this system has. The Confucian question is what relationships each part has to every other part. An organization that asks both is much harder to fool with local optimizations.
6. Keep It Simple and Practical
ITIL: Use the minimum necessary steps
ITIL’s sixth principle advises practitioners to use the minimum number of steps necessary, eliminate non-value-added activities, and apply outcome-based thinking to deliver practical solutions.
The Dhammapada on the verse-form ethic
The Dhammapada is one of the most accessible texts in any religious tradition, and that accessibility is intentional. Its 423 verses are short, mnemonic, and almost aphoristic, designed to be memorized and recalled in the moment of decision. “All that we are is the result of what we have thought.” “Hatred is not appeased by hatred at any time; hatred is appeased by love alone.” “If the traveler can find a virtuous and wise companion, let him go with him joyfully.” Buddhist teaching holds that wisdom worth having fits in a verse. An ethic that requires a manual is, for most people in most situations, not an ethic at all. For a service manager, the Dhammapada’s question is how much of your process documentation could be replaced by a single short principle that any team member could recall under pressure. The answer is usually most of it.
The Dasam Granth on practical application
The Dasam Granth, traditionally attributed to Guru Gobind Singh, holds a place alongside the Guru Granth Sahib in the Sikh tradition, though its status varies among Sikhs. While the Guru Granth Sahib is contemplative and devotional, the Dasam Granth is more active in tone, focusing on personal conduct under pressure, the application of principle to circumstance, and the cultivation of the capacity to act when action is required. The text is a reminder that simple principles are not the same as easy ones. Knowing the Dhammapada by heart does not make a person wise. Living it under stress does. The Dasam Granth emphasizes the discipline that turns principle into practice, the daily exercise that makes the right response available when the moment arrives.
What a service manager takes from both
The Dhammapada and the Dasam Granth address the two halves of “Keep It Simple and Practical.” The Dhammapada makes the case for simplicity in articulation: if it cannot be expressed in a verse, it has not been simplified. The Dasam Granth makes the case for the practice that turns simple principle into reliable action. An IT organization that achieves the first without the second has a memorable principle that no one applies. An organization that achieves the second without the first has a culture of disciplined response that is exhausting to sustain because the principle is not internalized. ITIL’s call to keep it simple and practical requires both halves to land.
7. Optimize and Automate
ITIL: Eliminate waste and let technology do the routine
ITIL’s seventh principle instructs organizations to eliminate waste, deploy human resources where they add genuine value, and automate everything that technology can handle more efficiently.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church on systematic transmission
The Catechism is a remarkable document, widely regarded as a work of organizational design. Its purpose is to make the doctrine of the Catholic Church transmissible without requiring the direct presence of an apostle or a magisterial authority. By codifying belief, moral teaching, the sacraments, and prayer in a systematic, indexed form, the Catechism distributes religious instruction in a way that scales across geography, language, and time. Read through service management eyes, the parallel to platform engineering is striking. The Catechism is to Catholic doctrine what a well-designed internal developer platform is to engineering practice: a codified, accessible, self-service system that allows routine work to be handled without requiring the original experts to be in the room. The work that goes into building the Catechism is enormous; the cumulative work it saves is much greater.
The Tripitaka on the Vinaya and the algorithmic monastic life
The Tripitaka, the Pali Canon of Theravada Buddhism, is composed of three baskets: the Sutta Pitaka (discourses), the Abhidhamma Pitaka (philosophical analysis), and the Vinaya Pitaka (the monastic rules). The Vinaya is the most operationally interesting for our purposes. It contains hundreds of detailed rules governing monastic life, from waking hours to the handling of robes to the procedures for resolving disputes. Read uncharitably, the Vinaya looks like bureaucracy at its most elaborate. Read more carefully, it is something closer to an algorithmic specification of a way of life: a rule set sufficiently detailed that following it produces, by structure rather than by individual heroic effort, the conditions for awakening. The genius of the design is that the monk does not have to decide what to do most of the time. The decision is made by the Vinaya. The mind is freed for the practice the rules exist to enable.
What a service manager takes from both
The Catechism and the Vinaya are two distinct approaches to the same problem ITIL’s “Optimize and Automate” seeks to address: how do you scale a practice beyond the founders, beyond the experts, beyond the heroes? The Catechism scales through codification. The Vinaya scales through procedural specification. Both instruct the IT leader on the same point: optimization is not about making people work harder. It is about doing the design work once, so the routine can be handled correctly without ongoing heroic effort. The well-designed automated pipeline is a Catechism for deployments and a Vinaya for operations. The intelligence is in the structure; execution becomes almost effortless.
Seven Traditions, Seven Principles, One Convergence
By the time the series reaches this entry, the project’s basic shape is clear. Machiavelli wrote about governing complex systems amid uncertainty. Sun Tzu wrote about competing and winning without unnecessary destruction. Fourteen philosophers from a Monty Python drinking song wrote about value, evidence, iteration, meaning, holism, simplicity, and rule-following. Now fourteen sacred texts from seven of the world’s great religious traditions have illuminated the same seven principles from another angle entirely: the angle of how human communities organize themselves around what matters most.
I want to be especially candid about this entry. The audacity of comparing scripture to service management is not lost on me. Hindus, Muslims, Buddhists, Sikhs, Jews, and Christians do not read these texts as comparative case studies in organizational design. They read them as the path, the law, the dharma, the sangha, the covenant, the gospel. The parallels in this essay are partial and structural, drawn at the level of how complex human systems are described and managed. The depth of each tradition is, in every case, far beyond what this essay surveyed.
Yet the parallels held in every section and every pairing. Mill on stakeholder value found a partner in Krishna on action without attachment to fruits. Sun Tzu’s emphasis on knowing yourself found a partner in the Torah’s pragmatism with the people actually present. Hegel’s dialectical iteration found a partner in the centuries-long argument of the Talmud and in the verification chains of the Hadith. ITIL’s call for visibility found a partner in the ummah’s public rhythm and in the gurdwara’s open architecture. The convergence spans cultures, millennia, mythologies, moral ontologies, and the sacred and the secular.
This convergence certainly does not mean ITIL is sacred or that scripture is operational guidance. Instead, it means that human beings organizing themselves to manage complex shared activity have been asking certain questions for as long as we have records of those questions, and that the answers, when honestly arrived at, share more structure than the surface differences suggest. ITIL’s seven guiding principles are a recent, secular, IT-specific articulation of those answers. Their durability across two ITIL versions is one signal of their soundness. Their convergence with the wisdom of Krishna, Confucius, the Buddha, Lao Tzu, the Hebrew prophets, the Christian gospels, the Prophet Muhammad, and the Sikh Gurus is a much louder signal.
A coda on method, since I have been transparent about it throughout the series. The mapping in this essay was again generated by an AI. The prose is mine. The curation is mine. The audacity is mine. As I noted in the Philosophers piece, this division of labor (humans deciding which questions matter, machines doing the searches, and humans evaluating and writing) feels like the right shape for our era. It is also what made an essay like this possible, written by someone who has read the Bible and not the other thirteen.
The tools change. The principles endure. And the deepest reservoir of wisdom on managing complex human systems may not be in IT textbooks at all.
About the Author
Dane is an accredited ITIL 5 trainer and consultant based in Sweden. He has delivered more than 400 ITIL courses to more than 4,500 students across all certification levels. This is the fourth entry in a series comparing classical, sacred, and modern frameworks with the ITIL guiding principles. The fifth and final entry, an epilogue comparing ITIL with the modern frameworks it shares its industry with, follows. He readily acknowledges that this essay would have been impossible without an AI collaborator and that any errors of fact or interpretation regarding the religious traditions discussed are his alone.
This article was first published on Substack on May 5, 2026.