In his book Being Peace, Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hahn shares the Fourteen Precepts of the Tiep Hien Buddhist Order. Tiep Hien is a particularly Vietnamese order of Buddhism that Hanh thinks might find resonance with some Americans. We will spend May looking at some of the precepts to see what they might have to say to us, especially about process values.

The first precept of Tiep Hien Buddhism is:            

 1. Do not be idolatrous about or bound to any doctrine, theory, or ideology, even Buddhist ones. All systems of thought are guiding means: they are not absolute truth.

When I first read this, I thought, “All systems except this one.” I had a little laugh at the naiveté of the author. But on reflection I realized that this is not a system of thought, it is a system of thinking about systems of thought. In our language, it is a process value, maybe the foundational process value that leads us to all the other process values. Doctrines, theories, and ideologies are all content values. And being bound by or idolatrous to them is another way of saying taking a position on your content values. Doctrines, theories, and ideologies all arise out of concerns about certain forces of the natural order. The problem is, most of them are the codification of a certain set of practices that worked under a certain set of conditions. They were approximations that only worked well when and where they were formulated.

Chris Alexander, in The Timeless Way of Building, talks about patterns in architecture and compares them to patterns in nature. Oak leaves, ocean waves, and sand dunes are examples. Each sand dune is like other sand dunes in that it is a response to opposing forces in nature, and each sand dune is unique because the exact strength of each force is different from one sand dune to the next. There is no absolute truth about the shape of a sand dune. Each sand dune is an approximation of the ideal sand dune that is a response to the forces where that sand dune exists. And each sand dune shapes the forces that exist for other sand dunes within a fairly wide radius. Each culture must find a system of thought that approximates the ideal for the forces in the environment in which the culture exists, and part of that environment is the systems of thought of neighboring cultures.

And conditions, forces, are not static. In his book, Operations Research for Immediate Application, R. E. D. Woolsey, a consulting management scientist, tells a story that fits here. He was working with a client that needed a way to find optimal solutions quickly for their operations. The function that controlled their operations was a complex, non-differentiable function, which in layman’s speak means you couldn’t easily just use calculus to go to the top of the hill or the bottom of the valley and say, “Here is where we operate.” But Woolsey was able to find a simple set of linear approximations for where they were operating. These he presented to them in a simple graph that they could enter with a couple of values and find the optimal value where they should set their machines.

Woolsey went back to that company years later. He found two things. A) they were operating in a totally different part of that complex function where the linear approximations were totally different and 2) they were still using the graph he had given them years before! His solution, like all systems of thought, was an approximation, but the company had been treating it as absolute truth. And the company didn’t understand why the answers, which once were so elegant, were now garbage.