This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Nakayama Miki was a Japanese farmer's wife in Shoyashiki, in what is now Tenri, Nara prefecture, living an ordinary rural life until October 1838, when, at the age of forty, she entered a trance during a Buddhist healing rite performed for her son. In Tenrikyo's own account she became in that moment the shrine and living instrument of God the Parent, Tenri-O-no-Mikoto, a claim of direct divine indwelling rather than of prophecy received at a distance.
What followed was not a retreat into private religious life. She gave away her family's own wealth, opened her home to the poor, and taught that clearing away the mental dust of greed, self righteousness and arrogance allows the joyous life God intends for all people to flourish, a teaching aimed at ordinary daily conduct rather than at abstract doctrine alone.
Her teaching drew official suspicion under both the late Tokugawa shogunate and the Meiji government that followed it, and she was arrested and briefly detained more than a dozen times over her final decades for practising without state sanction, hardship Tenrikyo remembers as central to her example rather than as an embarrassment to be minimized.