Quotes from The Lotus Sutra, Vol. 2
“The Tathagata is also like this for he is a father to the whole world. He has long ago completely gotten rid of all fear, distress, anxiety, ignorance, and blindness; has attained immeasurable insight, powers, and freedom from fear and has gained great supernatural powers and wisdom. He has fully attained the perfections of skillful means and wisdom. His great mercy and compassion never stop. He always strives for benevolence and the enrichment of sentient beings. He was born into this threefold world — an old, decaying, burning house — to save sentient beings from the fires of birth, old age, disease, death, anxiety, sorrow, suffering, agony, folly, blindness, and the three poisons, and to teach and transform them, enabling them to reach supreme and perfect enlightenment.”
Reference: Gene Reeves, (2008) The Lotus Sutra: A Contemporary Translation of a Buddhist Classics, p.91
Excerpts From A Discourse on The Lotus Sutra
Venerable Xiao Pingshi
In short, the desire realm is plagued by all three poisons, the form realm by two poisons, and the formless realm by one poison. In other words, the three realms are nothing but greed, aversion, and delusion. Seeing that all sentient beings are suffering from the fires of the three poisons, the Tathagata made the great sacrifice of being born in the human world to teach us how to stay away from the miseries caused by the three poisons and to extinguish such poisons’ fires. After a Tathagata is born in the human world, he will teach sentient beings how to attain the fruition of the unsurpassed, complete, and perfect enlightenment.
A Discourse on the Lotus Sutra, Vol. 4, p. 295