[The Parable of the Burning House] is interpreted as saying that the world is like a burning house. But the idea of escaping from the world is not what the sutra teaches. Elsewhere it makes clear that we are to work in the world to save others. The point here, I think, is more that we are like children at play, not paying enough attention to the environment around us. Perhaps it is not the whole world that is in flames, but our playgrounds, the private worlds we create out of our attachments and out of our complacency. Thus, leaving the house is not escaping from the world but leaving behind our play-world, our attachments and illusions, or some of them, in order to enter a real world.
A Buddhist Kaleidoscope; Gene Reeves, The Lotus Sutra as Radically World-affirming, Page 191