While the Lotus Sutra provides plenty of reason to be grateful to the past and thus was perhaps all too compatible with East Asian ancestor veneration, it is more adamant about the importance of bodhisattva practice as our contribution to the future.

The sutra is full of stories in which someone, usually a stand-in for the Buddha, tries to make things better for others in some way — a guide conjures up a rest facility so that his travelers will be able to continue their journey, a father-physician tricks his sons into taking an antidote for poison, another father entices his children out of their burning house by offering them rewards, still another father devises a way to gradually develop a sense of responsibility in his son.

In every case, appropriate action is a matter of being genuinely helpful toward others by somehow enabling them to be more responsible for their own lives and subsequently for the lives of others. Though Buddhist practice in East Asia has been concerned largely with the dead, the bodhisattva-way is primarily about the future and about future possibilities in the present.
A Buddhist Kaleidoscope; Gene Reeves, The Lotus Sutra as Radically World-affirming, Page 195