What … does it mean to be a bodhisattva? Basically, in the Lotus Sutra it means using appropriate means to help others. And that finally, for the Lotus Sutra, is what Buddhism itself is. It is an enormous variety of means developed to help people live more fulfilling lives, which can be understood as lives lived in the light of their interdependence. This is what most of the stories are about: someone — father-figure/buddha, or friend/buddha, or guide/buddha — helping someone else gain more responsibility for their own lives.

Even if you search in all directions,
There are no other vehicles,
Except the appropriate means preached by the Buddha.

Thus, the notion of appropriate means is at once both a description of what Buddhism is, or what Buddhist practice primarily is, and a prescription for what our lives should become. The Lotus Sutra, accordingly, is a prescription of a medicine or religious method for us — and, therefore, at once both extremely imaginative and extremely practical.
A Buddhist Kaleidoscope; Gene Reeves, Appropriate Means as the Ethics of the Lotus Sutra, Page 386