Tenri Kyō has been called the Christian Science of modern Japan. The comparison is not inaptly made. At heart both are faith-healing societies that profess to displace a negative evil, manifested in the form of the maladjustments of sickness and wrong, by establishing a normal relationship with the great health-giving stream that flows from the Great Source of all life. Each was founded by an extraordinary woman. During the creative periods of their lives, all unknown the one to the other, these two women were contemporaries. The churches which they established took form during the middle decades of the nineteenth century, the Japanese institution slightly antedating the American. The similarity extends even to names and their significations. Tenri Kyō means “The Teaching of Divine Reason.” It claims to inculcate a reasonable or “scientific” attitude towards life’s fundamental verities. It says that this is a reasonable universe. Final reality is a divine reason. He who lives according to reason shall prosper, he who violates reason shall perish. It is the will of the Heavenly Reason that man should attain here and now a full and free life, abounding in health and happiness. The name Christian science suggests practically the same thing. Yet there is absolutely no possibility of any connection whatsoever existing between these two movements in their origin and early growth. Finally, the phenomenal development of Christian Science in the world today has been matched by the extraordinary expansion of Tenri Kyō. The latter is undoubtedly the most rapidly growing religious body in present-day Japan. Statistics kept by the national government show four million three hundred thousand adherents. Tenri Kyō on its own part claims a membership of five million. Its missionaries are already carrying its gospel of faith and healing all over the Pacific area.
The founder of Tenri Kyō1 was born into the Maekawa family of the village of Sammaiden situated in the province of Yamato, not far from the ancient city of Nara, on June 2, 1798,2 just twenty-three years before the birth of Mrs. Mary Baker G. Eddy. The family was of the well-to-do farmer class and influential in the community. The male members were permitted to carry the swords of the samurai. Credulity has already begun to weave the garments of fancy about the great teacher. A local myth declares that on the day of her birth an auspicious cloud of five colours hung over the home, to the vast amazement of the villagers.
The little girl was given the personal name of Miki. She carried this throughout her entire life. Her followers today sometimes affectionately speak of her as Grandmother Miki. Between the ages of seven and eleven she attended the village school of her birthplace and received the elementary education considered appropriate to a middle-class girl of the time, learning reading, writing, sewing and weaving. She is said to have been especially skilful in needlework, an accomplishment which in her later years of voluntary poverty she was able to turn to good account. As a little girl Omiki San was of delicate health and inclined to be pensive in disposition. She was naturally rich in benevolence and affection and frequently revealed her innate spirit of mercy by her deeds of kindness to the neighboring children.
The members of the Maekawa family were earnest followers of the Jōdo sect of Buddhism and from earliest childhood Miki was surrounded by strong religious influences. This led her,. while still at a very immature age, to decide to abandon the world and become a nun. This pious ambition was perhaps fortunately frustrated by her marriage at the age of twelve to Nakayama Zembei, the twenty-three year old heir of a neighboring family of wealthy farmers. The condition on which the daughter accepted the marriage was that she should be given freedom to conduct morning and evening services before the home altar to Buddha. This early devotion appeared later as a Buddhist colouring in certain of the Tenri Kyō teachings.
This remarkable woman, married when a mere child, lived to almost ninety years of age and in the course of her life as wife to Zembei, gave birth to six children, one son and five daughters. Fortunately, motherhood did not come to her until she was a young women in her early twenties. Two of the girls died in early childhood; two married in their youth and left their mother’s home to live elsewhere. The eldest child, the boy, named Shūji, and the youngest girl, named Kokan, are revered in the annals of the sect as the members of the family who understood their mother best and who revealed their understanding by staying by her to the end to afford her support and comfort in the years of trouble and persecution through which she was called upon to pass. Mrs. Nakayama seems to have been a model of Japanese wifehood and motherhood, patient, hardworking, thrifty, affectionate and kind. Thus it is not by chance that Tenri Kyō so strongly emphasizes the domestic virtues. Its teachings dwell repeatedly on the beauty of perfect harmony between husband and wife.
It was twenty-eight years after her marriage, on the ninth of December, 1838,3 that there came a sudden crisis into Mrs. Nakayama’s life which brought with it the conviction that God had taken possession of her to reveal himself through her and save the world. On the day just named her son, Shūji, was suffering acutely from recurring pains in the feet, her husband was afflicted with an aching of the eyes and she herself was distressed with some kind of irritation of the stomach. Perhaps it was colic. An itinerant Buddhist priest, a sort of mediumistic ascetic, was called in to treat the sick members of the family and while assisting in the practice the mother herself went into a trance. The Tenri Kyō texts say that she became transfigured by the glory of God and that a great dignity settled upon her. When the amazed friends questioned the possessed woman regarding what the manifestation might mean, a voice speaking through her replied, “I am the Commander of Heaven.” And when they asked who the Commander of Heaven might be, the answer came back: “I am the original and true God who has come down from heaven to save the whole world.”
The trance continued for three days. During this time the exasperated and matter of fact husband, supported by apprehensive friends and relatives, tried to reason with the possessing spirit in the hope of securing its voluntary withdrawal from the body of his wife. But the spirit was obdurate against all pleadings and finally after the husband and his family had been threatened with extinction if he did not yield, the man consented to a strange compact which bound his wife to become the living shrine of the god, Tenri. Immediately, she came out of her trance and simultaneously, by what Tenri Kyō believers declare was a mighty miracle, father, mother, and son were healed of their infirmities. This occurred on the twenty-sixth day of the tenth month (lunar calendar) of the year 1838.4 It is called the First Revelation and is sometimes taken as marking the founding of the Tenri Kyō church. Real organization did not appear until much later, however. Nevertheless, October twenty-sixth is celebrated each year as the Grand Autumn Festival of Tenri Kyō.5
The event just described marked the beginning of a deep intensification of the religious life of Mrs. Nakayama. Before this she had been an unusually devout and upright woman who went about doing good in the spirit of the best Buddhist compassion. Now she became a god-possessed saint, living in this world but not altogether of it. Prior to her great transforming experience she had been famous for her almsgiving and her unselfish concern for the poor and troubled. Now her property interest and any desire for personal reputation and advantage that she may have had before seem to have disappeared completely, as if lost in the perspective of a better vision into the true relationship of values. To the utter dismay of husband and relatives she insisted on selling all the property that the family owned and utilizing the income for the relief of poverty and suffering. Her husband struggled against her through long years of discouragement, but whenever his resistance reached a point of open breach and antagonism his wife was strangely stricken with sickness which lifted immediately when he yielded. Likewise, the woman within the saint struggled against the divine usurper, but whenever the distracted wife and mother attempted suicide, as she did time and again, she was seized with an unaccountable paralysis that bound her hand and foot. Her former friends and relatives forsook her, her husband died, worn out by vain resistance, her self-inflicted poverty brought her to such extremity that for lack of the means wherewith to buy even candles she was often obliged to sit in the cold moonlight, sewing and spinning late into the night in order that she and her two children might have a little food. The boy supplemented their livelihood by peddling vegetables in the village. The neighbors mocked them from their comparatively well-fed complacency; she was ridiculed as a witch, as possessed by fox and badger, as insane; she was jailed time and again and corrected with physical punishment by the police. The main grounds of opposition on the part of the authorities were that Tenri Kyō was conducting public worship and propagating religion without governmental license, that as a teacher of false deities or as a woman possessed by an evil spirit, Mrs. Nakayama was misleading the people with erroneous beliefs and that the zeal with which the new faith was propagated amounted to a disturbing of the peace with a noisy pounding of drums and shouting of the name of the great god, Tenri. To these occasions of misunderstanding should be added the inevitable animosity of priests of other systems of faith and the antagonism generated among practitioners of medicine by the miraculous healings which Tenri Kyō claimed for itself. In the midst of much contumely and persecution she went quietly about among her fellow villagers, calling on such few as would receive her and insisting that sickness was the result of a warped and unclean spirit and that it was the will of God that man should have health of body and soul on the one condition that he trust God enough to permit Him to sweep away the dust of sin that soiled the human temple.
Finally the god-possessed woman won a great victory. Little by little her fellow villagers were compelled to believe in her. From small beginnings her gospel spread in ever widening circles, first throughout the local district and then throughout the nation. We are informed in the Tenri Kyō literature that the transition from struggle and misunderstanding to public confidence and achievement was hastened by many miracles of healing which were performed by the founder. When Mrs. Nakayama died, on January 26, 1887, she left behind her in the faith of those who had come to accept her teachings the foundations of a great church. One year after her death the national government gave permission for the legal incorporation of Tenri Kyō. At first the new religious body was classified as one of the sub-sects of Shintō Honkyoku. It is true that some of the mythological material of which it makes use is of Shintō origin, but it reveals as much, or more, of Buddhist influence. It was not until 1908 that Tenri Kyō gained complete legal and institutional independence. Recent expansion has been one of the most remarkable manifestations of contemporary Japanese history. When the fortieth anniversary of the death of the founder was observed in 1926 over six hundred and fifty thousand people attended the ceremonies at Tamba Ichi.
The chief teachings of Tenri Kyō are embodied in four texts which are accorded a sufficiently exalted position in the reverence of the church to warrant the name of sacred writings.6 The first of these is the Mikagura Uta, or Dancing Psalms, produced by the founder between the months of January and August, 1867, and added to between the years 1871 and 1875. It is worth noting that these dates coincide almost exactly with the discovery of the secret of the “Science of Christianity” by Mrs. Eddy in 1866 and her publication of the first edition of Science and Health with a Key to the Scriptures in 1875. The Dancing Psalms consist of twelve hymns made up of ten stanzas each, the whole introduced by a prologue, and intended for recitation in connection with the dances which the church employs as a characteristic part of its public worship.
The second scripture is embodied in a document called Ofude Saki, or “The Tip of the Writing-brush,” composed by the founder during the fourteen years lying between 1869 and 1882. This second text is much more extensive than the Dancing Psalms, consisting as it does of a collection of 1,711 hymns, published originally in seventeen books which Mrs. Nakayama believed were given to her in a series of revelations from the one true God, Tenri. They comprise the principal doctrinal and practical teachings of the church. In addition are “The Instructions” (Osashizu), compiled between 1887 and 1907 from the revelations and recollections of the carpenter disciple, Iburi Izō, and a highly imaginative and mythological book of allegories called “The Ancient Chronicle of the Mud-sea” (Doro-umi Koki) dictated by the founder when eighty-six years of age.
The difficulty of understanding the writings of Mrs. Nakayama is increased by their lack of continuity in thought as well as by their all too apparent grammatical shortcomings and their vague use of words. Literature contains few documents that impress one more vividly with their muddy incomprehensibility than does “The Ancient Chronicle of the Mud-sea,” when read for the first time and without commentary. These defects while retarding clear understanding on the one hand have fostered variety of interpretation on the other. It is only gradually, through the years, as the traditions of the church have become more and more definite that anything approaching a standardized doctrine has been evoked from Mrs. Nakayama’s sayings.
The translation of the Prologue to the Dancing Psalms, given below, may suffice to furnish something of an idea of the nature of these verses.7
(The people)
Sweep away evil and save us,
Oh Thou Divine Reason, Thou great King and God.8
(The God)
Stop a bit. I have something to say.
Listen to what God says. I speak not that which is false.
Taking as my pattern Heaven and Earth of this universe,
I have made wife and husband.
This is the beginning of this world.
I sweep away evil and am in haste to save you all.
When once the world has been made clean then the Sweet-dew Altar (shall appear).9
I look down the range of the myriad of ages
And there is not one who has understood my heart.
Thus it must be, for no one has ever told you.
It is not without cause that you have not known.
But now God is revealed before you
And sets forth a matter completely.
Though you are told that this place is Jiba10 of Yamato, the Home of God,
Yet you do not understand the reason.
When one has thoroughly learned the reason,
Whoever he is, he begins to long for the Home.
If you wish to learn, and if you search me out, I will teach you thoroughly
About the reason for all things.
When God appears and teaches you a matter completely,
Then the whole world is inspired with courage.
I am in haste to save you all and that right speedily.
So take courage, Oh, hearts of the world.11
The idea of the general salvation of all men which the prologue so definitely announces appears repeatedly in the Tenri Kyō texts as the cardinal teaching of the church. The first great principle which the founder received as a revelation from God was announced in terms of a universal salvation—
“To save those who are sick and those who are in trouble, those who are in mental anguish and those who are in pain; to save mankind from all distress and suffering, from all sickness and misfortune and thereby to make man over anew and lead him into a life of joy.”
Tenri Kyō Lecture Hall at National Headquarters
The attainment of this salvation requires on the part of man that the evils of the heart be swept away. This leads to the doctrine of the eight “dusts” whereby the spirit of man is made unclean. When this hokori or dust is swept out and everything made clean within, the soul and body of man are reestablished in a normal relationship with the life-giving, healing spirit of the universe and man immediately gains his proper heritage of serenity and health. It affords a pleasing glimpse into the excellency of the domestic practice of the founder that she thought of the initial processes of the good life in terms of house cleaning.
The first of the dusts is hoshii, which means inordinate desire or covetousness. It is described in the commentaries of Tenri Kyō as the spirit which leads a man to desire things beyond what are necessary and suitable to that sphere of life wherein God has placed him. It is desire for food, clothing, houses, wealth, reputation and pleasure which does not take into account the real happiness of others.
The second dust is oshii, which may be translated by stinginess, niggardliness, miserliness or parsimoniousness, all in an atmosphere of sordid and sullen malevolence. It is described as that personal selfishness or spiritual apathy which sees the pain and need of others and does nothing, which wilfully withholds help and cooperation in the face of the manifest distress of one’s fellow men. Tenri Kyō teaches that wealth is not the rightful possession of the individual wherewith he may do as he pleases. It is merely a loan from God and must be returned to God in service to man. Tenri Kyō does not practice communism as has sometimes been alleged nor does it insist on absolute surrender of property. It does teach, however, that a man will give according to the measure of his faith and it constantly holds before its membership the example of the founder who gave all that she possessed.
The third dust is kawai or misdirected love. It is sometimes given in the texts as henai, or “unbalanced love,” or jiai, “perverse love.” “Love,” says the teaching,’ “is the most beautiful and the purest possession of man.” The love of parent for child, of child for parent, the mutual affection of husband and wife and of friend and friend—these and other examples are given as the manifestations of the finest sentiment known to the entire range of human virtues. In any of these relations, however, we may sometimes find unbalanced or perverse love. Among illustrations given for the guidance of believers is that undue solicitude of parent for child which interferes with the normal and free development of the child and which, by the expression of a kind of love-selfishness on the part of the parent withholds proper correction, nourishes dependence, or fosters wilfulness in the child. Another example is found in that vague altruism which announces general principles of conduct while overlooking the concrete obligations of husband and wife, parent and child, of friends, of society and of nations. Here may be included all self-love which disregards others as well as those wandering affections which destroy the bonds of the home. Here in this dust one may find the souls of all those who do outward good for the sake of reputation and power.
The fourth dust is nikui or hatred. It is explained as the overlooking of the faults of oneself and the entertaining of a spiteful, distrustful and suspicious feeling towards others. This kind of dust includes jealousy and envy. Examples given are the feelings which a step-mother sometimes harbours towards a foster child and the hatred and scorn which the doer of evil sometimes seems instinctively to feel toward the loyal and the good. The commentary says:
“When once we come to entertain a feeling of suspicion and dislike toward another person, even though that person does good we interpret it as evil. We make a small needle into a big pole. We overlook merit and emphasize mistakes… Nothing destroys peace and injures the truth of heaven like this.”12
The next dust that must be swept out before the health of God can come in is urami, “spite” or “revenge.” Tenri Kyō teachers recognize that this negative attitude is closely similar to the one just described. A distinction is made between them, however. Nikui is the emotion of detestation, envy or suspicion aroused in the heart regardless of whether or not any real or imagined personal wrong exists. Urami is the active emotion of hatred or revenge that one person entertains toward another when he feels that he has been injured in some way by that other. It is the evil spirit which leads to all attempts to get even with others for supposed or real injuries. Before the healing spirit of God can come to live with a man, all urami must be displaced by an active love, even for one’s enemies.
The sixth dust is haradachi or anger. It is characterized as the destroyer of inner peace, the enemy of magnanimity and patience, and the subtle poisoner of both mind and body. Even the tendency toward anger must be eradicated before the human spirit can be healed.
The seventh dust is gōman. This means arrogance, insolence, haughtiness or pride. It is the opposite of true modesty and is the negation of genuine tenderness and gendeness. The teaching says, “Lowliness and gentleness of heart is a beautiful virtue.” Haughtiness and pride bring strife and turmoil. Arrogance leads to urami and nikui—to the desire to get even, to make others suffer for insults and injuries. This destroys the inner peace of the individual and tends to disorganize society. It is an active cause of physical and spiritual sickness among men.
The eighth and last dust is yoku or selfishness, sometimes written shi-yoku, or the desire for self. This is the comprehensive root of all the other evil attitudes. Covetousness, meanness, misdirected love and haughtiness are all born of selfishness, while hatred, spite and anger are merely its specialized forms. The desire for self must give way to the desire for a higher life in which the personal will is completely directed by the will of God.13
The result of the presence of all this dust in the heart is an uncleanness and unnaturalness of body and spirit which we know as physical and mental sickness. A paragraph in The Outline of Tenri Kyō says:
“As long as dust is within us the Parent will not enter into our being. Clean work can only be done at clean places. Into a place thick with dust none would care to step. Many people, however, have a heavy accumulation of dust in their hearts so that the Parent cannot enter therein. Consequently, their bodily existence cannot be placed under the protection of the Parent. Disease and misfortune come about through absence of such divine protection. Thus (as the Founder said) ‘the root of sickness is in the mind’.”14
The dusts are swept away by the exercise of a sincere faith and a surrender to the benevolence of the Great Parent that displaces vice and evil with good. The moral regimen requisite to inner renewal stipulates that daily, from morning until night, he who would be healed must nourish a quiet spirit of thankfulness to God. He must meditate on the truth that all the good which he possesses is a gift from God. He must observe the Way of disinterested service to others. He must practice daily introspection and live in the confidence that he is becoming a better man. As the dusts are swept away, the wonder of restoration to health will be wrought, sometimes gradually, sometimes suddenly. A vital belief in miracle is fostered in the church, based on an extensive record of healing. The believer is taught to expect the miracle to take place anywhere and at any time, perhaps in the home, perhaps in the shop, perhaps in the field. Frequently it will take place in the meeting of the church where the individual is supported by the faith and prayers of many other believers. As a means of uniting the spirit of the individual with the larger healing influences of the spiritual world, Tenri Kyō teaches a simple formula of prayer which is repeated endlessly in both private and public worship:
Ashiki wo harote, tasuke tamae, Tenri Wo no Mikoto.
“Sweep away evil and save us, Thou Wonderful King of Divine Reason.”
Among the positive rewards attendant on the sweeping away of the dusts of evil, highest place is given the virtue of sincerity. In one of the propaganda texts of the church can be found the following beautiful tribute to sincerity—shinjitsu.
“Sincerity is the attitude of an awakened spirit that has been swept clean of the eight dusts and made free from evil fate. Your true self is spirit and this is sincerity itself. Sincerity when it works naturally is truth. Truth, therefore, is the principle of your spirit. And since your spirit is a part of the Spirit of God, the principle of your spirit is the Principle of Heaven. Thus, the truth of the heart of sincerity is the Truth of God, Himself, and sincerity which is revealed in truth is communion with God. ‘Of all the thoughts and acts which come before me,” says God, ‘if only there be a little sincerity, if only a bit of the Truth of Heaven, then quickly will I accept it and quickly will I reward thee.’ For sincerity and God are one and inseparable…
Thus does God desire sincerity. And not until one prays with sincerity does prayer have power to prevail with God. Spiritual salvation is a blessing from God that is given only to sincerity.”15
A life which is fully and sincerely surrendered to the divine will and which is completely immersed in the heavenly reason will realize the following eight satisfactions: longevity, freedom from sickness, harmonious and peaceful adjustments, succesful accomplishment of undertakings, prosperous descendants, sufficiency of material things, a thankful spirit and inner tranquillity.
This is the ideal estate of man here in this world, unattained though it is in incomplete human life. Life is incomplete because complicated individual and social maladjustments frustrate the full manifestation of the will of God. In the presence of this situation Tenri Kyō sets up as its major ideal the reformation of human society through the purification and revitalizing of its individual members.
Other teachings of Tenri Kyō can only be briefly summarized here. The soul of man is part of the omnipresent spirit of God.16 The body of man is a mere device which has been temporarily loaned to him by God and all things that concern and support the body here on earth belong absolutely to God and should be used by the borrower in a god-like spirit of benevolence to fellow men. The selfish use of the body and its supporting physical environment leads to a false freedom and from this, together with the uncleanness of spirit to which man is prone, arise all the diseases and misfortunes that afflict mankind. This, of course, is merely a variant statement of the doctrine of hokori. The base of the trouble is corruption of spirit. “Selfishness,” says the founder, “is a bottomless deep of muddy water, but when the heart is clean, there is Paradise.”17 She declares repeatedly that the root of suffering and sickness is the mind.18 One who has been entirely cleansed from evil and who is constantly and intimately in contact with the health-life of God should live on this earth to the age of one hundred and fifteen years and at death pass on to a de-naoshi, “a starting over again.” Under obvious Buddhist influence this is believed to be a reappearance in this world, not a new life in another world.
A doctrine of fate, called the “Truth of Causality,” that again has probable origin in the Buddhist training of the founder runs through the entire teaching. A fate of two kinds, one evil or black and the other good or white, predetermines all things for man. But predetermining and potent as it is, it is nevertheless the creation of man himself. Evil fate is the accumulated “dust” of all human history and previous incarnations lodged in perverted and incomplete human society and in the corrupted human spirit. White fate is all the achieved virtue of the race, individual and social, reaching back to creation itself, supported and promoted by “a divine protection from behind the scene.” Tenri Kyō is a way of overcoming fate, that is, of turning black fate into white fate. The process is in the Tenri Kyō scheme of salvation. When the channels of communion between the free spirit of God and man are made really clean and open, then the natural, divinely ordained conditions of health are reestablished and the evil fate is immediately and marvelously transformed into good fate. This is the doctrine of innen-no-kirikae, or “change-of-fate.”
Tenri Kyō exalts the dignity of labour and the virtue of unrequited service to others. A cardinal doctrine is that called hi-no-kishin, meaning the daily contribution of work and good deeds which believers are expected to perform on behalf of their fellow men, or “a devoted life of holy labour” that appears as the spontaneous manifestation of sincerity. At Tenri Kyō schools a part of the afternoon of each day is devoted to manual labour which the students share without distinction of sex. Tenri Kyō followers erect their own church buildings and improve their own property. Such service is not limited to the membership of the sect. The believers are taught that it should be given to anyone in need or wherever there is opportunity to make a contribution of human kindness for fellow mortals, the community, the nation, and the whole world. They are taught that the motive that supports this should be a forgetting of self and its ambitions for personal gain in a joyful devotion to others and sincere thanksgiving to the Parent. One should be thankful to fellow men for a chance to do them good. The teaching declares that this is nothing other than a human manifestation of the spirit of God, Himself. It is the expression of a heart of absolute love. One who lives thus, with attitudes and emotions swept clean of all evil and with will surrendered to God in the service of man, rises thereby to the estate of tannō or contentment, which is the sphere of perfect love. This is the complete union of God and man. One of the commentaries says:
“To worship the Parent, to be loyal to the Parent’s will, to free our minds from evil and selfish thoughts, living with happiness of heart and in the satisfaction of purified minds—this is the meaning of Contentment. And it is this state of divine contentment that makes it possible for us to sever ourselves from the root of evil causality so as to turn to the good order of life.”19
One of the teachings which lays vivid hold on the imagination is that of the unfinished altar. The holy of holies of Tenri Kyō is a certain spot in Tamba Ichi called jiba, meaning literally “ground-place,” but better translated, perhaps, by some such expression as “the site.” It was at the jiba that the feet of the founder once stuck fast so that she was unable to move. It was in this way revealed to her as the center of the world and the place where the creation of man and things had been consummated by God. The original jiba is now extended to an area of twenty acres of holy land at Tamba Ichi within which the sect headquarters are built. At the very heart is a spot about four feet square around which lies the main temple of Tenri Kyō. A hole in the roof leaves this bit of consecrated ground open to the sky. Above the jiba an altar is being built, slowly through the years—an altar which cannot be completed until the teaching has gone throughout the whole world and all men everywhere have been cleansed of the dusts of evil and made real brothers in their service of God and one another. Then universal peace shall reign among men and sickness and suffering shall be no more. The completed altar is to be a six-sided tower of stone which shall rise to the height of eighty-two inches in thirteen stages. Only the first two of these are now in place. The remainder await the progressive cleansing of mankind. On the top of the altar is placed a shallow dish filled with barley flour. Into this God sends down from heaven his life-giving nectar, hence the name, kanro dai, “the sweet-dew altar.”20 The nectar can be shared only by those who have been really cleansed from all defilement and thus brought into the possession of a capacity for complete communion with God. Those who eat will live out the hundred and fifteen years which has been divinely appointed as the full span of human life here below.
A tendency to appropriate traditional mythology and to add various unique elements of fancy is widely prevalent in Tenri Kyō. It is apparent in various places, sometimes as an impossible cosmology, sometimes as attempts at history, anthropology or geography so naive as to approach the quality of comedy. These fanciful elements are referable mainly to the fact that the world-view of the founder was strongly coloured by the highly imaginative and uninstructed peasant mind of her time, partly to the fact that the church has drawn its constituency largely from the rural classes. A point at which it is particularly difficult to find logical clarity lies in a teaching, which is made to rest on an alleged revelation received by Mrs. Nakayama, to the effect that the Great Parent God has manifested himself in the form of ten different deities, most of them taken from the Old Shintō folklore. Recent interpreters insist that these ten divine beings are correctly understood as symbolizing the various phases and attributes of the Parent Deity, Tenri. Thus far, of course, we only find a repetition of a perfectly intelligible tendency that appears in other Shintō sects, but the accepted representations of these deities in Tenri Kyō are so irrational that it is well nigh impossible to reduce the concepts that support them to ten attributes that are either important or mutually exclusive, or that can be readily related to fundamental human experience. It is not easy to find anything very significant, for example, in a mythological extravaganza that makes the Great Parent reveal himself in one form as a single-headed dragon, called “Moon,” who symbolizes the moisture-producing attribute of nature, or, again, as a twelve-headed serpent, called “Sun,” whose chief characteristic is a capacity to grow increasingly heavy thus sharing the potency of woman to become heavy with child, or, again, in an idea that Omnipotence took on the form and nature of a tortoise and thus furnished in figure and attributes the materials for the creation of the female organs of sex. The imagery suggests the substance of which dreams are made.
After careful effort to make the best of the mythological language and attempt to penetrate through to the underlying meaning, it is discovered that each deity is presented with more than one attribute, some of them distinctly incidental as the scale of highest human value goes. The attributes that do appear are such as power, protection, wetness, warmth, masculinity, femininity, maternity, paternity, positiveness, extension, etc.
The extraordinary expansion of Tenri Kyō in recent times has been mentioned. This should be made more definite. If we follow the ordinary procedure and accept the initial revelation made to Mrs. Nakayama in 1838 as marking the birth of the new church, then almost exactly one hundred years have elapsed since the beginning of the movement. In this relatively brief period of time Tenri Kyō has grown to the dimensions of a great society of five million adherents. It has established ten thousand local churches and supports a working staff of sixty-two thousand men and women. In membership, in organizational strength, in leadership, in number of evangelists and teachers, it compares favorably with the greatest of the older religious bodies such as Zen and the Shinshū sects of Buddhism. More than this, no other contemporary movement indigenous to eastern Asia compares with it in missionary enthusiasm. Also, in the development of educational and propaganda institutions, as well as in social welfare activities, Tenri Kyō has made conspicuous progress. It supports at the site of the national headquarters in Tamba Ichi a flourishing training school for workers, a foreign language school for men where Mandarin, Cantonese, Russian, Malayan, Spanish and English are taught to candidates for over-seas service, a similar school for women, a middle school for boys, a higher school for girls, a primary school, a kindergarten, an orphanage, a day nursery, a large library and an extensive printing establishment, as well as numerous dormitories for the use of pilgrims. An institute for training Korean teachers is maintained at Seoul. A nation-wide woman’s organization claims a membership of two hundred and twenty thousand. A national young men’s association exists with a constituency of over two hundred thousand.
A review of the Thirteen Sects of modern Shintō, even though made in outline, leaves one with the impression that they are destined to widen in influence and to multiply in number of adherents in the years that lie immediately ahead. Such a point of view is justified not merely by their phenomenal growth in recent times—for mere size of constituency may mean nothing more than compromise with mediocrity or worse—but mostly by their promise of progress in line with the best ethical and intellectual demands of the contemporary world.21 It is true that in ethnocentrism, in proneness to turn religion to the support of a special political apologetic and in mythological confusion, as well as in devotion to outworn traditionalism in ceremony, they have much to overcome—some more than others. On the other hand, their avowed syncretism with whatever they feel to be best in other systems raises them beyond the danger of the stagnant dogmatism that has so limited the usefulness of whole areas of institutional Christianity in the West and holds out to them the possibility of survival in an ongoing world. They have revealed a surprising facility in adapting inherited thought forms to the demands of a progressive philosophy. Their ethical content at its best is as fine as the nobility of universal human nature itself. Their emphasis on sincerity builds foundations as indispensable to permanent social good as does Buddhist compassion or Christian love. Their doctrine of purification, beginning in a primitive, external cleansing from ceremonial defilement and ending in the expulsion of all negative and unsocial attitudes and the attainment of inner peace and unselfish mutuality, ultimately reaches the true heights of genuine personal and social religion. Their tendencies toward universalism will grow strong in proportion as the veil of economic frustration is lifted from before the eyes of the Japanese people. Accomplishments already revealed seem to give assurance that defects in making response to practical needs in social welfare activities and religious education will be overcome as a better trained leadership and more abundant material resources are secured. Finally, the sects make significant recognition of the importance of women. Out of a total of 104,539 teachers reported for all the sects in the latest statistics 33,087 are women.
We have now examined the main features of modern Shintō both in its state and in its popular forms, and are in a position to turn in closing to the consideration of certain problems and conclusions. The final chapter will deal especially with the state system.
Tenri Kyō Guest House at Nara
1. There is a large literature on Tenri Kyō in the Japanese language, consisting mainly of propaganda material issued from the sect headquarters or written by individual followers. The account here given of the life of the founder rests mainly on an official publication entitled, Tenri Kyō Kōyō (“An Outline of Tenri Kyō”), published at Tamba Ichi Machi, Nara Prefecture, 1929; 410 pages. A book in English, entitled The Outline of Tenri Kyō, by Iwai Takahito, published at Tamba Ichi, in 1932, incorporates a translation of mcst of this Japanese original.
2. Kansei 10. 4. 18.
3. Tempo 9. 10. 23 (Oct. 23, 1838, of the lunar calendar).
4. Dec. 12, 1838.
5. In so doing Tenri Kyō makes no recognition of the change made in 1872 from the system of lunar months to that of the Gregorian Calendar.
6. See Tenri Kyō Kōyō, pp. 136–226.
7. Mikagura Uta (“The Dancing Psalms”), edition of 1916; Tamba Ichi Machi, Nara Prefecture.
8. This line is a translation of the name of the supreme deity, Tenri wo no Mikoto.
9. According to the belief of the church, when the teaching has been accepted throughout the whole world then the holy altar will be completed.
10. The holy place of Tenri Kyō.
11. Takeya Kenshin, Mikagura Uta Kaigi, (“A Commentary on the Dancing Psalms”), pp. 1–28; Tamba Ichi, 1928.
12. Ono Yasuhiko, Kyōgi to Shinkō (“Doctrine and Faith”), p. 97; Tamba Ichi, 1926.
13. For a discussion of the eight dusts see Ono, op. cit., pp. 77–111.
14. The Outline of Tenri Kyō, p. 200, Tamba Ichi, 1932.
15. Tenri Kyō Kōyō, pp. 246–7.
16. Op. cit., pp. 227 ff.
17. Dancing Psalms, X, 4.
18. Dancing Psalms, X, 7 and 10.
19. Outline of Tenri Kyō, p. 210, slightly edited by comparison with the text of Tenri Kyō Kōyō, pp. 244–5.
20. Kanro is mentioned in the Nihongi. Aston says, “Kanro, or sweet-dew, is the Chinese translation of the Sanskrit Amrita, the ambrosial food of the immortals.” Nihongi, II, p. 339.
21. The latest available statistics for adherents of the Shintō sects are as
| Shintō Honkyoku | 1,268,430 |
| Kurozumi Kyō | 563,407 |
| Shūsei Ha | 408,683 |
| Taisha Kyō | 3,365,955 |
| Fusō Kyō | 555,111 |
| Jikkō Kyō | 407,839 |
| Taisei Kyō | 727,918 |
| Shinshū Kyō | 777,117 |
| Mitake Kyō | 2,051,546 |
| Shinri Kyō | 1,503,076 |
| Misogi Kyō | 343,008 |
| Konkō Kyō | 1,092,046 |
| Tenri Kyō | 4,312,383 |
| Total for all sects | 17,376,519 |
From The Bureau of Religions, Department of Education, June 9, 1937.