Tenrikyo teaches that God the Parent, Tenri-O-no-Mikoto, created human beings in order to see them live joyously, and that the world exists for that purpose. The obstacle is not sin in the sense of guilt requiring atonement, but accumulated self-centredness that clouds the mind.
The central image is kashimono-karimono, a thing lent and a thing borrowed. The body is on loan from God; only the mind is one's own. Illness and misfortune are read not as punishment but as guidance, God pointing out where the borrowed thing is being misused.
What clouds the mind is described as dust, which settles daily and must be swept daily. Eight dusts are named: miserliness, covetousness, hatred, self-love, grudge-bearing, anger, greed and arrogance. None of them is a great crime, and that is the point. The teaching addresses the ordinary accumulation of small selfishness rather than dramatic wrongdoing, and the remedy is correspondingly ordinary and repeated.
Innen is causality carried across lives. It explains present circumstance without excusing it, since the mind one keeps today alters the causality of tomorrow. The goal state is yokigurashi, the joyous life, understood as a condition of the whole world rather than of the individual, which is why the teaching is not satisfied by private contentment.
Two practices follow directly. Hinokishin is voluntary work performed as an expression of gratitude for the borrowed body, from sweeping streets to disaster relief. The Sazuke is a healing administration bestowed on members who complete a course of instruction, performed with set hand movements and a set prayer, and given without charge.