Mount Kurama

Kurama sits north of Kyoto and carries the arrangement that governed Japanese religion for most of its history. Kurama-dera is a Buddhist temple, and Yuki Shrine stands on the same slope and enshrines kami. For more than a thousand years that was not a contradiction but the normal state of affairs, described by the honji suijaku framework in which kami were understood as local manifestations of Buddhist figures, and in which shrines and temples were built, funded and staffed together.

Mark Teeuwen and Fabio Rambelli have shown how thoroughly that combination shaped both traditions, and how much of what is now presented as purely Shinto or purely Buddhist was in fact produced by the forced separation of the two in the Meiji period. Kurama-dera's own object of worship is unusual even by these standards. The temple identifies it as a single cosmic power expressed in three figures, a formulation the temple set out in the twentieth century, and it sits at some distance from ordinary sectarian categories. The mountain is also thick with tengu legend, and the best known story holds that the young Minamoto no Yoshitsune was taught swordsmanship there. The fire festival held at Yuki Shrine each October, in which very large pine torches are carried through the village street at night by teams of men, is among the best known festivals in the Kyoto region and draws crowds that the narrow valley can barely hold.

Reiki tradition holds that in 1922 Usui Mikao undertook a period of fasting and meditation on Kurama and received the ability to heal by the laying on of hands, which he then began to teach in Tokyo. That account is the origin story a worldwide practice tells about this specific mountain. Justin Stein's history of Reiki traces how the practice moved from Usui's Japanese organisation to Hawaii through Hawayo Takata in the 1930s, and from there into the North American and European alternative therapy world after the 1970s, changing substantially at each transfer. The version most widely practised today, with its attunements, symbols and graded levels, is closer to what developed in the United States than to what Usui's Japanese successors maintained.

The atlas records the Kurama fast as the tradition's own account of its origin, and the transmission history as that research establishes it. It does not record Reiki as an effective medical treatment. Health agencies that have reviewed the published trials, including the United States National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health, report that the practice has not been shown to be useful for any health condition, and the atlas states that plainly rather than leaving it to be inferred. Its subject here is a religious origin site and the practice that claims it.