GLOBAL FAITHS: Tenrikyo promotes a joyous, giving life – Goshen News

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Japan has two major religious traditions. The native one is Shinto, a term that comes from the Chinese Shen Tao, meaning “the way of the gods.” It is reflected in the Japanese flag, which shows a big red sun, because the Shinto myth says that the emperor is a descendant of the sun goddess Amaterasu.

Japan’s other major religion, Buddhism, came to Japan by way of Korea when the Korean ruler in 552 C.E. sent an embassy to the Japanese royal court commending the Buddhist religion. Japanese rulers accepted the invitation to try Buddhism and liked it, especially since it came with the Chinese script, which Japan did not have until that time, and so Japan ever since practices both Shinto and Buddhism. It used to be said that Japanese people got married according to Shinto and got buried according to Buddhism. Japan’s major Buddhist denomination has been Jodo Shinshu, which comes out of Pure Land Buddhism.

As mentioned in a previous column, new movements have emerged out of Buddhism in Japan, such as Soka Gakkai, reported on here recently, but at least one has emerged out of Shinto. It is called Tenrikyo. Tenrikyo was founded by a woman called Nakayama Miki, known to her followers as Oyasama.

The basic aim of Tenrikyo is to promote the joyous life, and to that end it seeks to do away with greed, selfishness, hatred, anger and arrogance. I was able to attend one of their services one evening in 1969 and witnessed the central ritual of that service, which is a sequence of bodily movements to symbolize the sweeping away of dust, because human failings or shortcomings are not seen as offenses that incur guilt and must be forgiven, but rather as failures to understand and practice the way of the joyous life, failures which must be swept away. In fact, the divine being is seen as a parent, and his/her mission is to instruct human beings in the good way

Tenrikyo carries some resemblance to utopian movements in America that have proposed to create an ideal community, as did the Mormon church in its earliest days in Kirkland, Ohio, and then in Nauvoo, Illinois, or utopian communities such as New Harmony, Oneida, or the Shakers.

Tenrikyo’s ideal community is called Tenri City, located in Nara Prefecture. It was founded April 1, 1954, and has not only Tenrikyo’s headquarters, but a university, elementary and high schools, a hospital, a library and other auxiliary institutions to serve its followers.



Tenrikyo as a church is reported to have 16,833 locally managed churches and a worldwide following of 1.75 million. It carries some resemblances to Christianity, but I’ve not been able to determine whether its founder knew about Christianity and was incorporating some of its ideas. Christianity has always seemed to Japanese people to be a foreign religion, and Japan has always been interested in preserving its national identity, even though it has borrowed heavily such foreign things as Christmas and baseball. Only 1% of Japan’s population is reportedly Christian.

There are, however, Christian values Japanese people seek, and one of them is Christian marriage. As this column has reported, there are many couples who want to be married according to the Christian ideal, and this has led Christian missionaries who know Japanese to preside at these weddings, which Japanese people call “white weddings,” as reported in an earlier Global Faiths column.

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https://www.goshennews.com/news/lifestyles/global-faiths-tenrikyo-promotes-a-joyous-giving-life/article_10964240-e092-11e9-a172-fbaf0ca35cdd.html
 

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