Let’s look further at each of the three things that Shariputra realized:
He is a child of the Buddha. Here, and throughout the Dharma Flower Sutra, the primary meaning of “child of the Buddha” is “bodhisattva.” Here, Shariputra realizes that while being a shravaka, he is also a bodhisattva, actually more deeply and profoundly a bodhisattva. But being a child of the Buddha has other implications as well.

What Shariputra originally set out to find was an understanding of the world in which death is not the end of everything – that is, a world in which everything comes to nothing. In other words, he sought meaning in life, he wanted his own life to be meaningful, to amount to something more than death.

Basically, he found two things. First, he found that nothing can separate us from what Christians call the love of God and Buddhists the compassion of the Buddha. The Dharma Flower Sutra teaches repeatedly that the Buddha is all around us, nearer than we think. He is the father of us all, the Compassionate One. The second important meaning of this metaphor is that we owe our lives not only to our biological parents and ancestors, but even more to the process, the Dharma, by which we live and are sustained. Chinese and Japanese Buddhism place enormous stress on the importance of biological ancestors, but in the teaching that we are all children of the Buddha, we should realize that biology is only one of the ways in which we inherit from the past. What we learn from our teachers – usually to be sure in the first instance from our mothers or primary caretakers, but also from a whole company of teachers, including those we encounter in books – has an enormous impact on shaping who and what we are. And those of us who are significantly drawn to the Buddha Dharma will be especially aware of our indebtedness both to the Buddha and to the tradition that has made his Dharma available to us. In an important sense, we ourselves are children of the Buddha.