Just as Hegel in the West has helped us see beyond the limiting laws of thought that Aristotle formulated as the conditions of rational thinking, the law of identity, that A = A; the law of noncontradiction, that nothing is both A and Not-A; and the law of excluded middle, that everything is either A or Not-A, so the Buddhist heritage is similarly a liberating one. Hegel shows that when one thinks about a seedling, a bud, the flower, and its fruit, there is a sense in which each is distinct and other than the other. But at the very same time they are all aspects of the one plant. The shoot anticipates the blossom; the flower is but the transformation of the blossom, and the fruit, the ripened flower, and the promise of the seed and the sprout. In some intuitive way we can here “understand” that the question should not be “Are they the same or different?” but rather that the very difference is involved in the sameness; each momentary unit portends the next moment and is but the fulfillment of the previous one. The bud is and is not the flower; just as we are and are not the Buddha nature. The flower is not some final goal that the bud seeks; it is but a next stage on an eternally continuous process; similarly, Buddhahood is not some eventual final achievement, it is the continuous and temporal praxis of compassion. This surely is the intent when in the sutra the audience are all considered bodhisattvas, when many would have deemed themselves mere śrāvakas or pratyekabuddhas.
A Buddhist Kaleidoscope; John R.A. Mayer, Reflectioms on the Threefold Lotus Sutra, Page 156