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.