Oyasama Identifies the Jiba, Tenrikyo's Sacred Center

In 1875, Miki Nakayama, called Oyasama by her followers, identified the Jiba, the exact spot within what became Tenrikyo Church Headquarters at Tenri in Yamato Province, thirty seven years after the revelation Tenrikyo counts as her 26 October 1838 founding, already recorded here, and ten years before the Osaka governor denied Tenrikyo's first petition for recognition as an independent church on 29 April 1885, also recorded here. Tenrikyo holds the Jiba to be the exact place where God the Parent, Tenri-O-no-Mikoto, created the first human beings, and Church Headquarters' own history page lists the identification among the faith's dated milestones alongside the 1838 founding and the Meiji era's persecution. The spot is marked today by the Kanrodai, a wooden pillar standing at the center of the Main Sanctuary at Church Headquarters, and the Service, the ritual dance Oyasama had already begun teaching her followers, is performed facing it. Robert Ellwood's study of Tenrikyo, published by Tenri University Press and treated across religious studies literature as the standard English language academic account of the tradition by an outside scholar, reads the Jiba's identification as fixing a single, bounded sacred geography rather than a diffuse revelation, a claim distinguishing Tenrikyo among the new religious movements Japan produced in the same decades. The identification gave a movement that still had no legal standing and faced growing official suspicion a fixed physical center that persecution could not relocate; pilgrims travel to the Jiba from Tenrikyo's Japanese and overseas mission churches alike to this day.