Mikao Usui

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Mikao Usui was born on August 15, 1865, in the mountain village of Taniai in Gifu Prefecture, and by his forties had already worked as a civil servant, a businessman and a lay Buddhist practitioner without settling on the vocation that held him. Around 1922, after a period of fasting and meditation, accounts place him on a twenty one day retreat on Mount Kurama, a mountain northeast of Kyoto with a long history as a site of Buddhist and mountain ascetic practice. He returned describing a method of hands on healing he called Reiki, universal life energy, and in April of that year he settled in the Harajuku district of Tokyo and founded the Usui Reiki Ryoho Gakkai, a society through which he began teaching it formally.

Usui taught for only four years before his death on March 9, 1926, in Fukuyama, but in that short span trained more than two thousand students, eleven of whom reached the highest teaching level, Shinpiden. One of them, Chujiro Hayashi, a former Imperial Japanese Navy officer, went on to develop a more clinical, fixed position form of the practice at his own Tokyo clinic. It was there that Hawayo Takata, a Japanese American widow visiting from Hawaii, was treated and later trained, carrying the practice west after Usui's own short span of direct teaching had already closed.

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Reiki's founding is unusually well documented for a healing tradition of its kind, because it began recently enough that Japanese primary sources survive, and historians, most thoroughly Justin Stein in his archival study of the practice's circulation, have been able to check the version most Western students learn against them. Some of what circulates does not hold up: the widely repeated claim that Usui was a Christian minister or university president who searched Buddhist, Christian and medical texts for the method Jesus used to heal has no basis in the Japanese record and appears to be a later invention, most likely shaped by students building a founding story that would travel well to a Western, largely Christian audience. The Mount Kurama fasting retreat itself rests on later testimony rather than a document Usui wrote himself, though it is the account his own students preserved and is not contradicted by anything else on record.

What is solidly attested is the practical chain of transmission. Usui founded a Tokyo teaching society in 1922, trained several hundred to several thousand students by his death in 1926, and Chujiro Hayashi, one of his most senior students, ran the Tokyo clinic where Hawayo Takata trained before carrying the practice to Hawaii and the American mainland. Every branch of Reiki taught in the West today traces its lineage claim through that same documented chain, whatever embellishment individual tellings of Usui's own life have picked up along the way.