The Buddha was perfect, so they say. According to the scriptures, the Buddha had ears that were very long, perfect? Buddha had a tongue that was so long he could lick his ears, perfect? The Buddha had a head that had a bump on the center, it raised up, almost a little top on his head, perfect? The Buddha had a chest and a body in which everything curved outward, there was no inward curve like a men's chest, you know. Everything curved outward. His feet, the heels stuck out of the back, his legs looked like antelope's. In general, many people wouldn't call that a perfect looking body. Perfect in his mind, yes, he was. The different arahants, all the enlightened people, by definition none of them were perfect. Only the Buddha had a perfect mind. All the different Paramis, all of them were perfected. With all the other enlightened beings, not all the Paramis are perfected. They are very high, one or two might be perfected, but not all of them.
So when you think about physical perfection, it doesn't even exist. The perfect house, the perfect car, the perfect iPod, these things don't really exist. But, can we be very, very good and not perfect? Can we achieve good results, that aren't always perfect? Yeah, we can work towards achieving good things, we can work towards something being perfect. But to actually think we "should" be perfect, it doesn't work that way. We need to remember that there isn't this "perfect".
When I was a swimmer, we would watch the divers often. And for many of you who know about diving, or gymnastics, or a few different sports, they have judges that would grade things on a scale from one to ten. A ten would be considered perfect, whatever that is.
Some years ago in an Olympics, there was one girl who got tens in gymnastics from every judge, perfect tens. So we use the word perfect for the girl's performance, we label it "perfect", but really it's just something that looks very nice. Can we really say perfect?
You get a 100% on a math test. That is a perfect paper, that's fine. But you know, in Math it's very interesting, when I was a kid, and you had a fraction two over two (2/2), we would say "equals" one. And then when I was teaching math, this didn't work anymore Two over two was "equivalent" to one. It wasn't equal, it was equivalent. So what was a perfect answer when I was a kid, was no longer was a perfect answer when I was a teacher. Does the word perfect actually mean that much?
Can we "strive towards" perfection, yet be okay with being very, very good?