Ways of being helpful are not, at least not primarily, grounded in principles. The Lotus Sutra has very little to say about precepts, though it does not reject them and in chapter 14 (Carefree Practice) the Buddha provides four sets of prescriptions which bodhisattvas should follow, one having to do primarily with outward behavior, one with speech, one with attitudes, and one with intentions. But these are to be understood, I think, not as commandments but more like counsel or rules of thumb. Principles, at least in the strongest sense, are eternal, God-given, or at least implanted permanently in the nature of things. The hōben of the Lotus Sutra, in contrast, are provisional. Once used, they may no longer be useful, precisely because they were appropriate for some concrete situation. The children will not return to the burning house to be saved again. Once his sons have drunk the antidote to the poison, their father need not again tell them that he has died. This is because these stories involve discoveries, made rapidly or gradually. And once something has been seen or discovered, it cannot be unseen or undiscovered, though it might, of course, be rediscovered or be discovered again independently. So the means by which it is discovered is always provisional, viable in some point in time. Once the father has guided his son to maturity, he can die in peace, no longer needed. Once a raft has been used to cross over to the other shore, we no longer need the raft and we would be seriously burdened by trying to take it with us over land.

In such provisionality there is a scriptural basis, not so much for a critique of the tradition, but for the continuing development, the continued flowering of the Dharma. And this is why the Lotus Sutra provided an important basis for the transformation of Buddhism in a Chinese context. From the perspective of the Lotus Sutra the transformation of Avalokiteśvara into Kwan-yin is not a corruption of Buddhism but a flowering.
A Buddhist Kaleidoscope; Gene Reeves, Appropriate Means as the Ethics of the Lotus Sutra, Page 387