The two elements that have been lifted out of this story and widely used for various purposes are the idea that calling the name of the Bodhisattva will be sufficient to save one from any kind of difficulty and the idea that Kwan-yin [World-Voice-Perceiver Bodhisattva] takes on a great variety of forms or bodies.

Nikkyo Niwano of Rissho Kosei-kai said that Chapter 25 is the most misunderstood chapter of the Lotus Sutra. What he meant by this is that, properly understood, bodhisattvas are not gods from whom we should expect to receive special treatment, even in times of great trouble; bodhisattvas should be models for how we ourselves can be bodhisattvas, at least some of the time. In the Horin-kaku Guest Hall at the Tokyo headquarters of Rissho Kosei-kai there is a very large and magnificent statue of the Thousand-armed Kannon. In each of the hands we can see an implement of some kind, tools that represent skills that can be used to help others. When Founder Niwano first showed that statue to me, he emphasized that it should not be understood to mean that we should pray to Kannon to save us from our problems; rather, we should understand that the meaning of Kannon’s thousand skills is that each one of us should develop a thousand skills for helping others.