This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
In 1966, thirty one years after its founding, the Foundation established Ikoi-no-Ie Hospital, a 900-bed general hospital at the Home of the Parent in Tenri City, Nara Prefecture, Japan, a scale that places it among substantial general hospitals rather than a small clinic attached to a religious headquarters.
Tenrikyo Church Headquarters' own website describes the hospital as organized into a Medical Treatment Department, a Religious Guidance Department and a Service Department, three departments working together rather than a conventional hospital with a chaplaincy attached as an afterthought. The structure combines conventional medicine with Tenrikyo faith healing toward what the religion calls the realization of the Joyous Life, treating the two as complementary parts of one practice rather than as separate, competing approaches to a patient's care.
That three-department structure, thirty one years after the Foundation's founding mandate to explore all possible means of relieving suffering while retaining Tenrikyo teachings, reads as the specific institutional form that founding mandate eventually took: a real hospital built to combine medical treatment with the religious practice its founders never intended to set aside.