Board Thread:Theories and Speculation/@comment-25139119-20150807165411/@comment-26275777-20150809112303

This thread is actually very funny. Not going to take a stance on this one way or the other, because I think it's a non-argument. I just wanted to point out that the tailed beasts *are* chakra. They're beings made of chakra. Their existence is nothing like a human's existence, so maybe we should stop trying to define or talk about them as if they were normal and/or human. They're not singular entities. They can "exist" in more than one place at once.

Look at Katsuyu for instance, who's really one giant slug that lets portions of itself be summoned by Tsunade/Sakura. The (relatively) small fraction Tsunade summons is Katsuyu. So is each one that was hanging onto the villagers to heal them. So is the main body back in Shikkotsurin. Tsunade summoned Katsuyu to heal the Kages and Sakura summoned it against the Juubi - each of those summons is Katsuyu.

I think it's much the same thing for the bijuu. They have "main" chakra bodies which can be fragmented. "Jinchuuriki" are people who possess those fragments and can replenish it (i.e. "summon" more of it), and they can be said to "contain" the bijuu no matter how small the fragment they have is. Which is further proven by the birth of the Ten-Tails - it only had a fragment of the eight and nine-tails and yet was fully considered to be the Ten-Tails (and Obito its jinchuuriki). Later on, Madara becomes a perfect Juubi-jin, casts the Infinite Tsukuyomi, and Kaguya herself is reborn even though a good half of the Kyuubi is elsewhere (plus a full tentacle's worth of Gyuki in Killer B, which was apparently enough bijuu for him to survive the extraction).

TL;DR - Chakra (and by extension the tailed beasts, being chakra monsters) isn't defined by volume but by quality.