What is Reiki, and where did it come from?

What the name means

Reiki practitioners describe the practice as working with universal life force energy, known as chi, qi, and prana in other cultures.⁹¹⁰

Founding in 1920s Japan

Reiki was developed in Japan at the end of the 19th century by Mikao Usui, who was born in 1865 into a family of samurai ancestry and was a lay monk with a wife and two children.¹¹¹²⁷

The Hikkei biography reports that Usui entered a Tendai monastery as a child, later traveled abroad, and began Zen training in 1918 that lasted three years. It then describes a 21-day retreat on Mount Kurama after which he reportedly gained the healing power he later called Reiki. Practitioners also report that Usui used the monastic name Gyoho.²¹³

According to the Hikkei biography, after the 1923 Kanto earthquake Usui treated victims, moved his center to Nakano in 1925, and taught Reiki widely. Estimates of the number of students he taught vary, with figures of more than 2,000 given in several accounts.²⁷

Methods and teaching

Usui's daily practice included meditation, contemplation of the five Reiki Principles, and hands-on Reiki to self and others. Teachers passed Reiki to students through a course that included Reiju, a ceremony intended to pass Reiki from teacher to student. Usui taught Gassho meditation at the start of workshops and a breathing technique he called Joshin Kokyuu-Ho.⁹¹⁴

Zadro and Stapleton describe Reiki as a biofield therapy in which an attuned therapist places hands on or near the client's body. Reiki is described as noninvasive and nonmanipulative, owing to gentle touch on or slightly above the body.¹¹¹⁵

Chujiro Hayashi is credited with adding defined hand positions over the body and with setting up two healers working together with the patient lying down, a change from Usui's seated sessions. Hayashi developed a more systematic approach to Reiki, and the Reiki tradition credits him with these changes.¹⁶¹⁷

Spread to the West and the question of its history

Hawayo Takata, a first-generation Japanese-American, came to Hayashi's clinic for relief from several medical conditions, including asthma, and became a devoted student after months of treatment. With Hayashi's active guidance and support, she brought Reiki to Hawaii in 1937 and later to the US mainland, according to the University of Minnesota's Taking Charge of Your Wellbeing resource.⁷¹⁸

Several writers say Takata's account of Usui as a Christian minister was not accurate. Accounts from later researchers, including William Lee Rand, describe a Christian origin story as a reaction to anti-Japanese feeling in America during and after the war.³¹⁹²⁰