"Care" (Oteire)

This term is used to refer to the efforts God makes to reach out to humans in order to fulfill the intention of saving them and is meant to suggest an analogy with the way humans take care of garden trees to keep them in good condition or improve their condition.

It is especially when followers are taken ill that they speak of having received God's "care," which they see as alerting them to their mistaken state of mind. This usage of the term seems borne out by such scriptural references as the following:

Listen! There will be no help if your mind is in error. That is why I am giving you My care step by step.

Ofudesaki XV:70

It is painful, one says. The inside of the mouth is afflicted. Care given through the body is meant to let you know.

Osashizu, July 26, 1889

In its original usage, however, the term is not limited to its narrow sense of responding to and addressing humans' mistaken states of mind. A Divine Direction tells us:

Timber trees should not have branches; garden trees should have branches. From this principle of branches that should or should not be there, understand the truth of care.

Osashizu, April 19, 1893, supp. vol.

As indicated by this passage, God's care is ultimately based on what use God intends to make of available instruments. We may say that it is within this context that God's acts of reaching out to and caring for humans should be understood. The following verses, in which the term in question is translated by using the verb "tend," may be relevant to this point:

Day by day, I shall tend those trees which are to become My useful timber. Never take it to be illness.

Among the trees, there will be some that I shall tend step by step and others that I shall let fall as they are.

Ofudesaki III:131-132

(This article was first published in the December 2008 issue of TENRIKYO.)