[N]otice that there is not much use of the notion of emptiness (śūnyā or śūnyāta) in the Lotus Sutra. Of course, all things are empty. But it is because they are empty that there is space, so to speak, for the development of one’s buddha-nature. If things were substantial, they could not truly grow or change. But because they are without substantiality, they can be influenced by and have influence on others. Undue emphasis on emptiness is rejected because it can easily become a kind of nihilism in which nothing matters. In the Lotus Sutra everything matters. The Buddha works to save all beings. Even the poor Bodhisattva Never Disrespectful, who goes around telling everyone that they are to become buddhas, though initially not very successful, eventually “converted a multitude of a thousand, ten thousand, millions, enabling them to live in the state of supreme enlightenment.” And this is to say nothing of the fact that he later became the Buddha Śākyamuni!
A Buddhist Kaleidoscope; Gene Reeves, Appropriate Means as the Ethics of the Lotus Sutra, Page 389