There are, obviously, many ways to read a sutra, perhaps especially [the Lotus] sutra! I take it to be primarily a religious text, that is, a text whose primary aim is soteriological. Whatever polemical purposes it may have served in some now unknown part of India in some now unknown community of Buddhists, the text addresses itself to readers, and to the salvation of readers, in any time and place. Looking at the text in this way will not produce a uniformity of results, but can lead to a certain kind of vision of this text as primarily an ethical text, ethical not in the sense of offering a theory of morals, or in the sense of offering a set of commandments, but ethical in the sense of recommending a certain way of life, a way of life guided by a single overarching purpose.

That unifying purpose is nothing less than the salvation, the happiness, of the entire world, a purpose rooted symbolically in the Buddha’s and bodhisattvas’ vow to save all the living.

To that end, the sutra utilizes several closely related themes, especially upāya or appropriate means, the One Vehicle, buddha-nature, eternal Śākyamuni Buddha, and bodhisattva practice, all of which, in one way or another, affirm the importance of this world and the life in it of the reader.
A Buddhist Kaleidoscope; Gene Reeves, The Lotus Sutra as Radically World-affirming, Page 178