Nakayama Miki Teaches the Service for the First Time

Twenty eight years after Nakayama Miki's 26 October 1838 revelation that Tenrikyo counts as its founding, already recorded here, and nine years before she identified the Jiba as the faith's sacred center in 1875, also recorded here, Miki began teaching her small circle of followers the ritual practice that would become Tenrikyo's central act of worship. In 1866 she started composing the Mikagura-uta, the Songs for the Service, and instructing her followers in the accompanying hand movements and dance that make up the Service, work she continued for nine years until the songs reached their essential form the same year she identified the Jiba. Tenrikyo's own authorized biography of its foundress records that Miki taught the movements to ordinary men and women rather than to any priesthood, insisting the Service be performed together rather than by a single officiant, a departure from the shrine ritual its name recalls even though it borrowed the term kagura from Shinto's own sacred dance tradition. Robert Ellwood's academic study of Tenrikyo, published by Tenri University Press and treated across religious studies literature as the standard English language account of the tradition by an outside scholar, reads the Service Miki began teaching in 1866 as the moment the movement acquired a shared, repeatable ritual practice, distinct from the individual healing grants that had drawn her earliest followers and independent of the physical center the Jiba would give it nine years later. Meiji era officials, already suspicious of a farmer's widow gathering large followings for communal worship outside any recognized shrine or temple, would come to treat the Service's dancing as exactly the kind of gathering their later restrictions on Tenrikyo targeted.