At the end of the [prose section of the Divine Powers chapter] is a very interesting passage, a part of which is often used in Buddhist liturgical services. Let’s look at the entire paragraph:

After the extinction of the Tathagata, you should all wholeheartedly embrace, read and recite, explain and copy, and practice [this sutra] as you have been taught. In any land, wherever anyone accepts and embraces, reads and recites, explains and copies, and practices it as taught, or wherever a volume of the sutra is kept, whether in a garden, or a woods, or under a tree, or in a monk’s cell, or a layman’s house, or in a palace, or in a mountain valley or an open field, in all these places you should put up a Stupa and make offerings. Why? You should understand that all such places are places of the Way. They are where the buddhas attain supreme awakening; they are where the buddhas turn the Dharma wheel; they are where the buddhas reach complete nirvana.

Here, putting up a Stupa is a dramatic way of indicating that all places where the Dharma is embodied in actual life are sacred places, as holy as any stupa. In a sense, it is a rejection of the idea that only temples and stupas and such are holy places. For the Lotus Sutra, any place at all can be a holy place, a place of awakening, a place of the Way, simply by being a place in which the Dharma is embodied by being put into practice. And it is precisely in such places, wherever you are, that “the buddhas attain supreme awakening, … the buddhas turn the Dharma-wheel, … the buddhas reach complete nirvana.” This is a fantastically powerful affirmation of the reality and importance of the holy ground on which we all stand. In a sense, wherever Buddha Dharma is successfully shared or taught a Stupa has already emerged.

If you take refuge in the Buddha, the Buddha has refuge in you – your practice is what enables the Buddha to be alive in this world. Not yours alone, of course, but your practice of the bodhisattva way, along with the practice of others, is what can dispel the darkness and the gloom of living beings.