What Shariputra gains from realizing that he is a bodhisattva is not a safe quick trip directly to being a buddha, as on an elevator, but something more like admission to a long stairway. The stairway will be difficult. But the most important point is that there is a stairway, a way to overcome suffering from the unsatisfactoriness of life, and the Buddha’s teachings can lead us to such a stairway.

Is life really meaningful? That is what the story of Shariputra is about. And the Sutra’s answer is that life is and can be experienced as meaningful, or can be meaningful, because it is meaningful.

The Sutra understands itself to be good news for everyone – in one sense, a kind of wake-up call to enter a new world, or to experience the world in a new way; in another sense, it is a kind of public announcement that everyone is a bodhisattva and therefore that you are already a bodhisattva and are on your way to becoming a buddha. Hearing such an announcement, really hearing such an announcement, we should all be glad and full of joy!