Some interpreters of the Lotus Sutra may prefer to think that this space below the earth is a symbolic reference to the popular Mahayana Buddhist idea of emptiness. These bodhisattvas, they claim, emerge from emptiness. This could be right. But the Lotus Sutra is not much concerned with the concept of “emptiness,” using it in a positive sense only very few times. So it seems to me to be unlikely that it is what is behind this story. What this story wants to affirm, I believe, is not the reality of emptiness, but the reality and importance of this world, this world of suffering, a world that is, after all, Shakyamuni Buddha’s world and our world.