Nakayama Miki Founds Tenrikyo

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

On 26 October 1838 by the lunar calendar Tenrikyo still uses to mark its October Founder's Day service, Nakayama Miki, a farmer's wife in Japan's Yamato Province, experienced what her followers hold to be the revelation of God the Parent, Tenri O no Mikoto. Tenrikyo counts that revelation as its founding moment, the point from which everything the movement would become is traced.

What followed the revelation was not open acceptance. Decades of persecution under the religious authorities of Meiji Japan followed, a state order that treated the new movement with suspicion rather than tolerance for as long as it remained outside the recognized religious establishment. Legal standing of its own did not arrive until 1908, seventy years after the revelation that had started the movement.

What Miki's founding changed was the beginning of a tradition that would go on to survive Meiji era persecution, wartime suppression under Imperial Japan, and a postwar reordering of its own doctrine, still tracing every later chapter of that history back to one farmer's wife's experience in Yamato Province in 1838, decades before the movement she began ever won the right to exist in the state's own eyes.