Tenrikyo-Ofudesaki - Checking My Vocabulary - Evil
"Evil - Anything impairing happiness or welfare or depriving of good.
Anything that causes displeasure, injury, pain, suffering etc."
There are a number of ways of using the word "evil" other than those I have mentioned above. I for one had a problem with applying "sweeping away evil" to myself as my childhood understanding of the word leaned more toward the Satanic or demonic usage and I don't think of myself as having either of those qualities. The uses that I have chosen to use instead are, I imagine, much more in line with the intended meaning of the word as it is used in the Poems. That is the self sabotaging "evil" that can visit and depress a self-centered imagination that is lost in itself and that doesn't realize that the way out is in awakening to the one real truth of its origin.