Page 99 - The Buddha‘s Noble Eightfold Path

approximates to the Bodhisattva Precepts — or rather,

expressing itself in a way of which the precepts themselves are
but an approximation.

Total Action
Though the nature of Perfect Action should now be clear, there

is one last matter to be considered. Perfect Action is also total
action or, as perhaps it would be better to say, total act, i.e. that

act in which the total man is involved. Most people are too
divided, too fragmented, even, to act with the whole of
themselves. Practically all the time we act with only a part of

ourselves. When you go to the office or the factory, do you put
yourself wholeheartedly into your work there? I think not. You

might put quite a large slice of your energy into it, but quite a
large slice remains at home, or is tied up elsewhere. You do not
do your work with the whole of yourself. You do not give it your

full attention, interest, and enthusiasm. If you have a hobby, you
very rarely put the whole of yourself into the hobby, and even if

you are a woman you don't very often put the whole of yourself
into your domestic life. There is something that is left out, or left
over, so that we are all the time acting with only part of

ourselves. Even when we are acting from what is best in
ourselves, from our noblest impulses of kindness and generosity,

that act is not a total act inasmuch as there remain within us
impulses of unkindness, and ungenerosity from which, at the
moment, we are not acting. Thus even our Right Action — even

our so-called Perfect Action — remains imperfect in the sense
that it is not total. Perfect Action in the fullest sense is the

prerogative of a Buddha: only an Enlightened mind can

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