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Mikao Usui
The founder of Reiki was a Japanese Buddhist whose biography was rewritten as a Christian one — because that sold better in 1940s America.
Who they were
Mikao Usui (1865–1926) founded the healing practice that became Reiki, and is one of the better documented cases on this site of a tradition's origin story being reconstructed to suit a market.
Where they came from
The principal primary source is his memorial stone, erected in 1927 by members of his society at Saihōji temple in Tokyo, which records a summary of his life and teaching written by people who knew him.
From that and related Japanese sources: he was born in Gifu Prefecture in 1865, into a family with Tendai Buddhist connections. He worked in a variety of occupations, apparently including a period as a secretary or aide. In 1922 he undertook a twenty-one-day retreat of fasting and meditation on Mount Kurama, near Kyoto, and described receiving there the capacity that became Reiki.
He founded the Usui Reiki Ryōhō Gakkai in Tokyo the same year, taught by his own account around two thousand people, and treated large numbers of the injured after the Great Kantō earthquake of 1923. He died of a stroke in 1926.
The Western biography is substantially different and substantially false.
Reiki reached the West through Hawayo Takata, a Japanese-American woman treated at Hayashi's clinic in Tokyo, who brought the practice to Hawaii in the late 1930s and taught it in the United States for decades. In her account, Usui was a Christian minister and the dean or president of Doshisha University in Kyoto, who had studied at the University of Chicago and had been challenged by students to explain how Jesus healed.
None of this is supported. Doshisha University has no record of him. The University of Chicago has no record of him. He was not a Christian minister.
The likeliest explanation is not fraud but calculation. Takata was teaching a Japanese healing practice to Americans before, during and after the Pacific War — a period in which Japanese Americans were interned and Japanese religion was a considerable liability. A founder who was a Christian minister with an American doctorate was a saleable proposition. A Tendai Buddhist who received a revelation on a sacred mountain was not.
So the standard Western account of Reiki's origin is a wartime marketing decision that outlived its occasion by eighty years, and is still repeated in training manuals.
What they taught
The five precepts — the gokai — are recorded on the memorial stone and are the best-attested part of his teaching. They are ethical rather than energetic, and are given as a daily practice:
Just for today: do not anger. Do not worry. Be humble. Be honest in your work. Be compassionate to yourself and others.
He also taught hand positions, meditative techniques and the transmission called reiju, which became the Western attunement.
Japanese and Western Reiki differ. The surviving Japanese lineages — the Gakkai, and Jikiden Reiki, which traces through Hayashi — retain more of the meditative and self-practice material and place less emphasis on the symbols and the fixed hand-position sequences that dominate Western practice.
What we can and cannot say
We can say the man existed, the memorial stone is a real primary source, and the basic outline of his life is recoverable.
We can say the Western origin story is false in its specifics, and that the falsification is documented rather than alleged.
We can say this matters beyond trivia. A practice that presents a fabricated founding narrative, uncorrected for generations, in materials sold to paying students, has a straightforward problem of accuracy — and it is worth asking what else in a tradition has been shaped by what its market would accept. That question is not hostile to Reiki specifically; the same question could be put to the rainbow chakras and to much else in this section.
We can say the precepts are the part most worth having. "Just for today, do not anger, do not worry" is a workable daily discipline that requires no claims about energy at all, and a reasonable case can be made that it is what Usui was actually teaching.
We cannot say what happened on Mount Kurama, and neither can anyone else.
Further reading
- The Usui memorial inscription at Saihōji, available in translation.
- Frank Arjava Petter's research on the Japanese sources, which did much to surface the discrepancy.