It is one of Tenrikyo's three scriptures (sangenten 三原典), along with the Mikagura-uta ("The Songs for the Service") and the Osashizu ("Divine Directions").

In 1853, she had the Nakayama family's main house dismantled and sold and had the remaining rice fields mortgaged a couple of years later.

[6] In 1864, a carpenter from Ichinomoto Village named Izo Iburi visited Miki Nakayama, and as a gesture of gratitude, constructed a place where followers could pray, laying down the foundation for the structure known today as Tenrikyo Church Headquarters.

[7] An oral account of the writing of the Ofudesaki has been recorded in a Tenrikyo supplementary text (jungenten 準原典) known as the Anecdotes of Oyasama.

The term "exterior volume" (gesatsu) comes from an inscription written by the Maegawas (Miki's birth family) in Sanmaiden Village on the cover of one of the manuscript portions that Nakayama gave to them on 18 June 1874.

She presented them to the Maegawas as a gesture of gratitude for making the kagura masks that were to be used in the prayer service she taught her followers.

[13] In March 1883, the local police visited the Nakayama residence and attempted to confiscate the Ofudesaki manuscripts so that they could be destroyed.

However, Shinnosuke Nakayama, the grandson of Miki, claimed that two women at the residence, Omasa and Osato, had already burned them in compliance with a patrolman's order.

[15] In 1939, Tenrikyo Church Headquarters announced the change of its doctrine and ritual, under pressure to comply with the demands of State Shinto.

The main theme of the Ofudesaki has been described as "a development toward the perfection of Tsutome, the Service, through which, alone, human salvation can be realized.

[20] Other times the verses are instructions originally intended for specific people in Miki Nakayama's day.

The Ofudesaki is mostly written in a Japanese phonetic syllabary (a precursor to modern hiragana) and employs relatively few kanji, with only 49 distinct characters used.

Her script seems to be consistent with how rural people in Japan wrote during the late Edo period, when the standardized writing system had yet to be widely adopted.

However, the Ofudesaki contains certain syntactical features that require particular care in interpretation, such as non-indicative moods that may be referred to as subjunctive, optative, or imperative.

[25] The Ofudesaki has been translated into English, Russian, Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, Nepali, Indonesian, Thai, and Chinese (traditional).