Here there is an apparent contradiction — the sutra clearly insists that there is no time in which the Buddha is not present, but it also claims that he became a buddha. Chapter 16 answers Maitreya’s question at the end of chapter 15 by teaching that Śākyamuni has been a buddha from the very remote past, but this does not explain how he both always is and yet became enlightened. What is involved here, I think, is that on the one hand, in order both to affirm this world and to identify the Buddha with the Dharma, the everlasting process which is the truth about the nature of things, it is important to have him be eternal or everlasting. Just as there is, and can be, no place from which the Buddha is completely absent, there is no time in which the Buddha is not present. On the other hand, the very meaning of “enlightenment” requires that it be a process, and thus requires that Śākyamuni Buddha became enlightened. In fact, in several places the Lotus Sutra teaches that Śākyamuni Buddha became enlightened only after countless kalpas of bodhisattva practice. Further, only if he became enlightened could Śākyamuni Buddha be a model for others or an encouragement for them to enter the Buddha-way. So an apparent contradiction remains unresolved.

The sutra can be indifferent to such problems because they are soteriologically unimportant. Just as in chapter 24 when the Bodhisattva Wonderful Voice expresses to the Buddha of his own land his desire to visit the sahā world to pay tribute to Śākyamuni Buddha, and that Buddha warns him that even though the sahā world is not smooth or clean and its buddha and bodhisattvas are short, he should not disparage or make little of that world or think that its buddha and bodhisattvas are inferior. In this story too the point is that the sahā world is not to be regarded as inferior. In other words, the real point here is an affirmation of the sahā world. It is, we are told, a world which should not look for help from other worlds because it does not need help from elsewhere.

Thus the use of miracle stories in the Lotus Sutra is exactly the opposite of what is so often the case. Instead of using stories of other worlds as a way of encouraging escape from or negligence toward this world, in the Lotus Sutra stories of other worlds are used to radically affirm the reality and importance of this world.
A Buddhist Kaleidoscope; Gene Reeves, The Lotus Sutra as Radically World-affirming, Page 185-186