Skillful means is the tradition's explanation for its own inconsistency, and it is offered without embarrassment. A teaching is a tool aimed at a particular listener's particular knot; a different listener gets a different tool, and the tools may contradict. The Lotus Sutra gives it the famous illustration — a father promises his children three kinds of cart to get them out of a burning house, and gives them all one better cart, and is not judged a liar. Critics inside and outside the tradition point out how easily this licenses saying anything, and the counter-check offered is functional: the test of a teaching is whether it reduces suffering, not whether it is doctrinally tidy.