Following the deaths of his parents, Sensei’s uncle looked after him and cared for his estate. When Sensei turned down his uncle’s proposal to marry his uncle’s daughter (his cousin), however, the uncle’s attitude towards him changed. That was when Sensei became aware that his uncle’s interest in him was solely for his estate, and he came to harbor a deep distrust of people in general.

While attending school in Tokyo, Sensei boarded in a home maintained by a widow with a daughter his age. He soon became enamored of the daughter. When a classmate mentioned that he needed a place to board while attending school, Sensei recommended that he rent a room in the same home where he was boarding.

Not long after, Sensei’s classmate confessed to him that he was madly in love with the daughter. This, of course, caused Sensei much suffering, because typical of the Japanese during that time, although he was in love with the daughter, he had not expressed that love at all. He was thus unable to tell his classmate that he also was in love with the daughter.

Without telling either the mother or the daughter of his classmate’s feelings for the daughter, nor of his own feelings for the daughter to his classmate, Sensei asked the mother for the daughter’s hand in marriage. In other words, Sensei betrayed his classmate to further his own goal. It was only after Sensei’s marriage to the daughter was agreed on, that the classmate learned about Sensei’s feelings for the daughter, and the impossible situation he was now in. The result is that the classmate committed suicide.

That was when Sensei realized the depths of evil that lurks within humans that he had not even considered before, and how he had betrayed his classmate.

That’s that story line of the novel Kokoro. Who can find fault with Sensei’s “evil”? Yet I believe this novel expresses the depths of evil within human beings very well.

Because the Venerable Master looked so deeply within himself, he realized that such an evil person could not attain enlightenment through his own efforts. That is why, at the age of twenty-nine, he discarded the way of “self-centered effort” and entered the way of “Buddha-centered power.”