Tenrikyo in the context of "East Asian religions"

A new religious movement (NRM), also known as a new religion, is a religious or spiritual group that has modern origins and is peripheral to its society's dominant religious culture. NRMs can be novel in origin, or they can be part of a wider religion, in which case they are distinct from pre-existing denominations. Some NRMs deal with the challenges that the modernizing world poses to them by embracing individualism, while other NRMs deal with them by embracing tightly knit collective means. Scholars have estimated that NRMs number in the tens of thousands worldwide. Most NRMs only have a few members, some of them have thousands of members, and a few of them have more than a million members.

There is no single, agreed-upon criterion for defining a "new religious movement". Debate continues as to how the term "new" should be interpreted in this context. One perspective is that it should designate a religion that is more recent in its origins than large, well-established old religions like Hinduism, Judaism, Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam. Some scholars view the 1950s or the end of the Second World War in 1945 as the defining time, while others look as far back as the founding of the Latter Day Saint movement in 1830 and of Tenrikyo in 1838.

Nakayama Miki (中山 みき; 18 April 1798 – 26 January 1887 by the Japanese calendar) was a nineteenth-century Japanese farmer and religious leader. She is the primary figure of the Japanese new religion Tenrikyo. Tenrikyo followers, who refer to her as Oyasama (おやさま or 親様), believe that she was settled in the Shrine of Tsukihi from the moment she experienced a divine revelation in 1838 until her death in 1887. In Tenrikyo, she is also referred to as the Foundress of Tenrikyo (天理教教祖).

Upon her divine revelation, she gave away most of her family's possessions and dismantled the family's house, thereby entering a state of poverty. She began to attract followers, who believed that she was a living goddess who could heal people and bless expectant mothers with safe childbirth. To leave a record of her teachings, she composed the Ofudesaki and taught the lyrics, choreography and music of the Service, which have become Tenrikyo's scripture and liturgy respectively. She identified what she claimed to be the place where God created human beings and instructed her followers to mark the place with a pillar and perform the liturgy around it, which she believed would advance humankind toward the salvific state of the Joyous Life. In the last several years of her life, she and her followers were arrested and detained a number of times by the Japanese authorities for forming a religious group without official authorization. A year after her death, Tenrikyo Church Headquarters received official authorization to be a church under the Shinto Main Bureau.

In Tenrikyo, God is a single divine being and creator of the entire universe. God in Tenrikyo is most commonly referred to as Oyagami (親神) (lit. 'God the Parent'), Tenri-Ō-no-Mikoto (天理王命) (lit. 'absolute ruler of divine reason'), and Tsukihi (月日) (lit. 'Moon-Sun').

The first two characters in the Japanese kanji for Tenri-Ō-no-Mikoto are 天理, where 天 refers to heaven or divinity, and 理 refers to reason or knowledge, thus "Tenri" (天理) refers to divine or heavenly knowledge, and in a sense adds a divine nature to truth itself whereas "天理" also means "natural law" or its pseudonym, "divine law." The English name most frequently used to refer to Tenri-Ō-no-Mikoto outside of ritual is "God the Parent"; in Japanese, the equivalent common names are Oyagami (親神) and Oyagami-sama (親神様). In Tenrikyo, God has no gender.

Iburi Izō (Japanese: 飯降伊蔵; 1833 – 1907) was the second spiritual leader of the Tenrikyo religion. He is also known as the Honseki (本席, lit. 'Main Seat'). After the death of Nakayama Miki (Oyasama) in 1887, he was the spiritual leader while Oyasama's son Nakayama Shinnosuke became the administrative leader, the Shinbashira. Having received the "grant of speech" from Oyasama, Iburi dictated the Osashizu, additional divinely inspired instructions on the creation and maintenance of a Tenrikyo community.

In Tenrikyo, the Joyous Life (yōki gurashi, 陽気ぐらし or 陽気暮らし) is the ideal taught by spiritual leaders and pursued through charity and abstention from greed, selfishness, hatred, anger and arrogance. Theologically, the Joyous Life functions as the purpose of human existence preordained by God during the creation of human beings and as the means for the salvation of humankind.