Paper short abstract:

This presentation shows how a faith healing group embedded in a Shintō-Buddhist worldview developed its self-image as the 'revealed' 'world religion' Tenrikyō in 19th ct. Imperial Japan, negotiated through novel imported Christian-occidental ideas of religion and superstition.

Paper long abstract:

The Tenrikyō is a Japanese new religion, founded in 1839 by the peasant woman Nakayama Miki. Its formative phase has mainly been presented as the struggle of a 'revealed religion' against the Shinto-establishment of the modern Japanese Empire in the Meiji-period (1868-1912). New studies, however, question Eurocentric presumptions of the concept 'religion'. In this presentation, I ask how Christian-occidental conceptualizations of 'religion' and its constructed opposite 'superstition' shaped the discourse on what was to constitute the modern religious in Imperial Japan. I focus on how this negotiation affected the self-image of a small faith healing group embedded in a Shintō-Buddhist worldview to present itself as the 'revealed' 'world religion' Tenrikyō.

The Tenrikyō joined Denominational Shinto in 1888. Despite being attacked by intellectuals since the 1890s as a premodern, heretical teaching for its faith healing and unorthodox teachings, the group gained independence in 1908. In this presentation, I will contrast critical publications against the group with early Tenrikyō sources. I show how, despite of their contrary claims, both sides operated within the same discursive field. Both sought to adapt to a rapidly changing world view by relating their resp. arguments to Western concepts of religion and the new dominant paradigm of science, yet centering them on the specific Japanese configuration that was the non-religious Shinto ideology. Both resorted to the concept of 'revealed religion' in relation to the "natural order" of the cosmos in order to delegitimize or legitimize the Tenrikyō as a Shinto religion, respectively. This proves the intrinsic discursive nature of concepts such as 'religion' or 'superstition', and sheds new light on the formation of new religions. I trace acculturation processes of knowledge transfer in the 19th century and review the construction of global religious history by exposing how Western orientalist and ethno(euro)centric views were absorbed and instrumentalized by proponents of Japanese religions themselves.