Tenrikyo Ofudesaki - Your Life Will Be Stopped -

This warning will be revisited in the Theme Section concerning "returns" later on but for now we will ponder this one application of it. It seems pretty clear that the common understanding of this is that it is a threat of physical death made by someone claiming to be a god. It should also be clear by now that no such thing happened to the people who stopped the Service in the past or in the present or at any time. So what does it mean? Is it just an empty threat?

• To begin to understand these verses we will start by revisiting the fact that they contain poetic metaphors. That is to say that they use familiar words that are commonly understood to reveal an uncommon deeper meaning than those commonly used words are ordinarily capable of delivering.

  • As is always the case in the Poems there are three points of view that are presented in this Poem. For that reason we are hastened and encouraged to identify each of the points of view as they exist in our own mind and to understand by making the point of view of someone who is following a path of single-hearted salvation (returning our imagination to its original state by returning it to its original condition) our fundamental point of view.

    •  Take a moment and identify the point of view of a "child". That is the point of view that knows nothing about the true origin of the mind and instead functions according to accumulated common truths of the world. We are fortunate that the Tenrikyo Model Path maintains a clear memory of this point of view in recalling the suffering that Miki Nakayama and her family endured as a result of perceived assaults on their health and well being by various local gods, evil spirits and curses. Indeed, it is not hard to imagine that they were just the kinds of supernatural beings that for whatever reason could "stop a life". This is a point of view of that instills fear of the unknown and the kinds of feelings of powerlessness that often attend the human view of  illness, weakening and death as inevitable and frightful evils.

    • Next recall the point of view of a "parent". That is the point of view that is willing to do whatever it takes to help the "children" to mature and begin the Services or work of settling the imagination long enough to return the mind to its original pure conscious condition. In this case that means employing terminology that is familiar to the point of view of the "child"  and which sounds similar to the common truths of the world that up until that time filled their imaginations. Of course by now we know that the intention is not to strengthen or endorse those views but to settle them, by sweeping them away, so that the true origin of the mind that they are obscuring and depressing can be revealed as the foundation for the intended life of freedom and joy for all human beings equally.

    • The last point of view to be considered yields an uncommon meaning derived from the overall intention of the teaching. It is the point of someone who would follow a path of single-hearted salvation and in so doing ponder that the path is not one that includes "force" or "violence"; there are no hostile gods  evil spirits or curses because they only exist in the human imagination. There is also no arriving or withdrawing as everything is the body of the original one. Indeed from this point of view illness, weakening and death also don't exist. There is only the indiscriminate love that the one eternal and immortal original consciousness has for all of the instruments that make up its body, which is the universe.

Sure Guides: IVe