Among the Japanese Buddhist sects, the Amidhists place Amida Buddha on the lotus pedestal and worship him as the savior. The Tendai sect tended to spread the merit of “receiving and keeping the Lotus Sutra, reading it, reciting it, expounding it, and copying it.”... Not only was the Lotus Sutra worshipped as something sacred in itself, but also numerous Buddhas and Bodhisattvas who appear in the Lotus Sutra—Śākyamuni, Amitāyus, Manjusri, Maitreya, Bhaishajyarāja (J. Yakushi ), Akshobhya (J. Ashiku), Samantabhadra (J. Fugen), and Avalokitesvara (J. Kannon), came to be venerated. The Lotus Sutra especially spread the cult of the devotion to Guanyin or Kannon in China and Japan. Kannon is still regarded by many Japanese as the compassionate “savior-goddess.”
In contrast, for Zen practitioners Buddhas and Bodhisattvas are not the objects of worship but rather they are the living testimony of the life of spiritual pursuits. ...
In steering clear of the projected and objectively conceived view of the sacred or holy, Zen holds no “devotional” attitude to scriptures or to the founders of the sect, without precluding, however, the sense of reverence rendered to those fully embodied their “original face.” This Zen approach to the Lotus Sutra may appear prima facie “non-iconic,” or even “iconoclastic.” That is to say, Zen followers neither venerate it as a sacred object nor do they worship the Buddhas and Bodhisattvas as deities. Zen is the path that begins with discovering one’s own buddha nature, and as such it ultimately both denies and affirms the divine. It denies the divine as a concept, but it affirms the divine as that which sustains and nurtures the buddha nature. Moreover, Zen followers aspire to embody this divine reality. To become a buddha (or bodhisattva) may sound sacrilegious and blasphemous to the mind trained in the theistic tradition, which tends to consider God as a transcendent Being. However, it is by no means unfamiliar to the mystics of the theistic tradition. [
JUNDO: I am not so crazy about the word "DIVINE", so I prefer the slight improvement of "SACRED" or "ORDINARY NOT ORDINARY"]
http://www.ac.wwu.edu/~yusa/TheLotusSut ... eutics.htm