Of course it is impossible for any ordinary person to measure fully the virtuous qualities of even a single pore of the Buddha’s body, since it defies the rcach of ordinary thought. The inconsistencies and dissimilarities in the life stories of enlightened beings come about because those beings are perceived differently by the different levels of people who are to be influenced. It is therefore totally inappropriate to make fixed generalizations.
In the past, the buddha by the name Indomitable appeared with a body the size of eighty cubits, while the tathagata King of Stars was the size of one inch. The sugata Boundless Life lived for one hundred billion years while the sugata Lord of Assemblies appeared as living for just one day. These buddhas were definitely unlike ordinary people who have different life spans and degrees of merit. The buddhas appeared in those ways because of the different karmic perceptions of the different followers.
The superior qualities of our teacher. Buddha Shakyamuni. were perceived in varying ways, respectively, by common people, the shravaka followers of Hinayana. and the bodhisattva followers of Mahayana. Dcvadatta and the heretics perceived the Buddha only with their impure thoughts. This does not mean that the Buddha himself had different degrees of qualities, but only proves the individual perceptions of different people.
Master Padma was a supreme nirmanakaya. He appeared free from faults and fully endowed with all eminent qualities. He surely does not remain within the reach of people’s solid fixation on a permanent reality, but appeared according to those to be tamed. Consequendy, the clinging to absolutes concerning whether he took birth from a womb or was born miraculously, whether his different names and deeds in the Indian countries agree with one another, whether there are inconsistencies in the duration he remained in Tibet and so forth arc nothing but causes to exhaust oneself and prove one’s ignorance while attempting to conform the inconceivable to fit within the confines of conceptual thinking.
The Great Master expressed the real essence of this in his advice na