Reiki — History & the Five Precepts

Reiki is a Japanese hands-on-self energy practice founded by Mikao Usui in 1922, built around Five Precepts and a system of self-treatment hand positions. Below is its documented history and its Five Precepts; the app's Reiki guide covers a full twelve-position self-treatment sequence.

History

Mikao Usui and the Search for Anshin Ritsumei

Mikao Usui was born on August 15, 1865, in the village of Taniai (in what is now Miyama-cho), in Japan's Gifu Prefecture. Accounts describe him as an unusually wide-ranging student — of medicine, psychology, religion, and divination — and a practicing Buddhist who spent years in Zen training. What he was after had a name in Japanese Buddhist thought: anshin ritsumei, a state of settled, unshakeable peace of mind. Formal Zen meditation alone hadn't gotten him there, so in his late fifties he committed to something more intensive.

Twenty-One Days on Mount Kurama

In March 1922, Usui undertook a 21-day retreat of fasting and meditation on Mount Kurama, a peak north of Kyoto long associated with ascetic practice. Tradition holds that at midnight on the twenty-first day, he experienced a powerful light entering through the crown of his head — the culmination of the retreat. Descending the mountain afterward, he reportedly stubbed his toe, pressed his hands to it out of instinct, and noticed the pain and bleeding ease almost immediately. That experience — and the healing ability he believed it revealed — became the seed of everything that followed.

Founding the Usui Reiki Ryoho Gakkai

The following month, April 1922, Usui settled in the Harajuku/Aoyama area of Tokyo and founded the Usui Reiki Ryoho Gakkai — the "Usui Reiki Healing Method Society." What he taught was never just a hands-on technique: it was built around the Five Precepts as a path of character and spirit, alongside the physical practice of channeling healing energy through the hands. His memorial stone, erected by his students at Saihoji Temple in Tokyo, records that Reiki's purpose was "not only to heal disease but also to correct the mind." By the account inscribed there, Usui personally taught over 2,000 students and trained twenty senior teachers (shihan) before his death from a stroke on March 9, 1926, at age 60, while traveling to teach in Fukuyama.

What "Reiki" Actually Means

The name is a compound of two Japanese characters. Rei (霊) is the harder of the two to translate cleanly — something like "spirit," "sacred," or "that which is hidden/mysterious." Ki (気) means life energy — the same character root as the Chinese qi and the concept behind acupuncture and tai chi. Put together, Reiki is usually rendered "universal life energy" or "spiritually guided life force energy."

Chujiro Hayashi and the Clinic Years

Chujiro Hayashi, a former Japanese naval medical officer, studied under Usui in the early 1920s and was among his senior students. Where Usui's teaching had been more intuitive, Hayashi — drawing on his medical background — opened his own Tokyo clinic and began systematically cataloguing which hand positions seemed to correspond to which ailments, documenting the results in guidelines used to train other practitioners. He also changed how treatment was delivered, having patients lie on tables while multiple practitioners worked on them at once. It's Hayashi's more structured, clinical version of the practice that most of what's taught as "Reiki" today actually descends from.

Hawayo Takata Carries It to Hawaii

Hawayo Takata, a Japanese-American woman living in Hawaii, arrived at Hayashi's Tokyo clinic in 1935 in serious ill health and, by her own account, recovered over about four months of treatment. She trained under Hayashi, receiving her First Degree in 1936 and her Master initiation in February 1938 — his thirteenth and, as it turned out, last Reiki Master. Hayashi visited Hawaii in 1937–38 and formally named her his successor. Reiki historians consider this turning point more than a footnote: postwar Japan required healing practitioners to be licensed, and rather than submit, Usui's own Gakkai retreated from public teaching, nearly disappearing at its source. Had Takata not already carried the practice to Hawaii and, later, the American mainland, it might not have survived in any accessible form. She practiced and taught for over four decades, training twenty-two Reiki Masters before her death in 1980, and in the process simplified the more elaborate Japanese hand-position sequences into the streamlined form most Western students still learn first.

One Lineage Becomes a Worldwide Practice

After Takata's death, her twenty-two Masters carried the practice in different directions — some preserving her exact structure and fees, others (Iris Ishikuro among the first) teaching more openly, which accelerated its spread. Later decades saw new branches emerge — Tibetan-influenced blends, Karuna Reiki, Holy Fire Reiki, and others — each adding its own symbols or refinements on top of the Usui/Hayashi/Takata foundation. Despite that branching, most lineages still organize training around three levels tracing back to the original system: Shoden (First Degree, which includes learning self-treatment), Okuden (Second Degree), and Shinpiden (Master/Teacher level). Reiki entered mainstream Western medicine as a complementary offering in the early 2000s, with Mayo Clinic establishing a program in 2001 and Cleveland Clinic following in 2002 — both explicitly as comfort and relaxation support alongside, not instead of, standard medical care.

Where the Science Stands Today

In the interest of giving you the full picture: the U.S. National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health (NCCIH) states plainly that there's no scientific evidence for the specific biofield or energy that Reiki practice describes itself as channeling, and that most clinical studies to date are small, methodologically weak, or lack proper control groups. NCCIH has also found no evidence that Reiki causes harm. What that leaves is a century-old contemplative and relaxation practice with a well-documented history, a real (if modest and mixed-quality) research base behind its relaxation and comfort effects, and no basis for treating it as a substitute for medical care. This app presents it in that spirit — a self-care ritual with real historical roots, not a medical claim.

The Five Precepts