Preservation, Publication and Place in Tenrikyo

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.