Mikao Usui

Mikao Usui (1865–1926) was the founder of Reiki — the Japanese art of healing through the hands that has grown, in the century since his death, into a worldwide practice with more than a million practitioners. Born in the small village of Taniai in Gifu Prefecture, Usui was a seeker almost from the beginning: as a boy he studied in a Tendai Buddhist temple school and practised kiko, the Japanese discipline of energy cultivation, on the holy slopes of Mount Kurama. As an adult he ranged widely — through medicine, psychology, martial arts, and the religions of the world, travelling as far as China and Europe — while working an assortment of worldly jobs and raising a family with his wife, Sadako. Beneath it all ran a single question: was there a way to heal that drew not on one's own limited energy, but on the universal life force itself? The answer came in March 1922, in the experience at the heart of Reiki's founding story. Climbing Mount Kurama, Usui undertook twenty-one days of fasting and meditation — until, as his memorial stone records, he suddenly felt "one great Reiki over his head" and attained enlightenment, receiving the healing method he would call Usui Reiki Ryoho. What he did next defined him: rather than keep the gift within his own family, he resolved to offer it "widely to the general public." Within a month he had founded the Usui Reiki Ryoho Gakkai in Tokyo and opened a clinic in Aoyama, where — the stone tells us — the entrance overflowed with the shoes of visitors from near and far. When the Great Kanto Earthquake devastated Tokyo in 1923, Usui went out every morning through the ruined city, treating the injured and grieving by the thousands — service for which the government honoured him with the Kun San To award. By 1925 demand had outgrown his clinic, and he travelled Japan teaching until his death from a stroke in 1926, having taught more than two thousand students and trained sixteen to the master level. At the centre of Usui's teaching sit the Five Reiki Precepts — Just for today: do not anger, do not worry, be grateful, do your work diligently, be kind to others — a complete spiritual practice in five lines, recited daily by Reiki practitioners to this day. His system nearly vanished from postwar Japan, but one of his final students, the naval physician Chujiro Hayashi, trained a Japanese-American woman named Hawayo Takata — and through her, Reiki crossed the Pacific and encircled the world. Every Reiki lineage practised today traces back, hand to hand, teacher to student, to the quiet man on the mountain. His grave at Saihoji Temple in Tokyo bears his students' confident inscription: that after his passing, Reiki would "continue to spread far and wide." Few predictions have been more completely fulfilled.