“Medicine-King! Erect a stupa of the seven treasures in any place where this sūtra is expounded, read, recited or copied, or in any place where a copy of this sūtra exists! The stupa should be tall, spacious and adorned. You need not enshrine my śarīras in the stupa. Why not? It is because it will contain my perfect body.” Chapter 10, The Teacher of the Dharma

Through these words the Buddha teaches us that it is much more important to revere the Law itself than to worship idols. What he is saying is: However much a person may blaspheme the Buddha, his sin is still light. There is no need to deposit the Buddha’s relics in pagodas. The greatest veneration of the Buddha is to practice the Lotus Sutra, and the heaviest sin is to defame the lay devotees or monks who practice the sutra.

However, we must be careful in our understanding of this teaching. It would be a great mistake to think that it does not matter if we blaspheme the Buddha, or that we should ignore the Buddha’s relics. Sakyamuni Buddha was a great man who left us his precious teachings, and for this reason we cannot revere him too much. We worship the image of the Buddha in order to show our boundless gratitude to the Buddha, who left us his precious teachings. As mentioned repeatedly in this book, it is also done for the sake of deepening our reverence for the Buddha as our ideal, which we wish to approach little by little.

Moreover, through the image of Sakyamuni as the historical Buddha, we worship the Tathāgata Sakyamuni and the Eternal Original Buddha, namely, the Law preached by him. Worshiping the image of the Buddha is not idol worship. Idol worship indicates the idea of regarding the thing itself as the object of worship, believing, for example, that if one worships some object one’s disease will be cured, one will be spared from suffering, or one’s desires will be fulfilled. There is all the difference in the world between true worship and idol worship.