Ofudesaki

Miki Nakayama, a farm wife of Yamato province whom Tenrikyo reveres as the Shrine of God from her initial revelation in 1838, began the Ofudesaki in 1869, three decades into her mission, when she was already in her seventies. The follower tradition records her account of the process: the verses pressed on her from within until they were written, the brush moving, she said, at God's urging rather than her own. She wrote in the common script of village Japan, in 31-syllable waka verse, and the poetry's plainness is doctrinal, God the Parent stooping, as the verses themselves say, to speak in ways a child can grasp. Across the seventeen parts the teaching accumulates rather than systematises.

The body is a thing lent, a thing borrowed, and the mind alone is one's own, the root of the teaching on illness and misfortune as guidance rather than punishment. Eight dusts, miserliness, covetousness, hatred, self-love, grudge-bearing, anger, greed and arrogance, settle on the mind and must be swept, and the sweeping is the service. The kanrodai, the sacred pillar to be set at the Jiba, marks the spot of humankind's original conception, and the verses press repeatedly for the performance of the service around it, through which the world will be renewed toward yokigurashi, the Joyous Life that God intends. Later parts grow urgent with the foundress's conflicts with authorities and her followers' hesitations.

The foundress wrote the seventeen parts over thirteen years, numbering and dating most of them, and the autograph manuscripts are preserved by Tenrikyo Church Headquarters in Tenri, the city that grew around her residence and the Jiba. Her writing years overlapped the hardest period of her mission: repeated detentions by police under a state pressing Shinto orthodoxy, the last in her ninetieth year, and the verses respond to these trials directly, reading them as steps in God's timetable. After her death in 1887 the movement passed through decades in which, to secure legal standing within State Shinto categories, its distinctive scriptures were kept in the background; the Ofudesaki was not published for general circulation until 1928, and its full doctrinal restoration came with the postwar return to the founding teachings, the fukugen, after 1945.

Since then it has stood unambiguously first among the three scriptures, the others being the Mikagura-uta, the songs the foundress composed for the service danced around the kanrodai, and the Osashizu, the recorded directions given through Izo Iburi after her death. Tenrikyo's teaching that the foundress remains everliving at the Jiba gives the verses a present tense for believers, and headquarters editions print the original script with standardised readings; an official English translation with romanisation has been through multiple editions, and translations exist in the languages of the movement's overseas missions.