Mikao Usui

Mikao Usui (15 August 1865 – 9 March 1926) was the Japanese founder of Reiki, a hands-on practice he called Reiki Ryoho (“spiritual-energy healing method”).

He was born in the village of Taniai in the Yamagata district of Gifu prefecture, and most reliable sources describe him as a lay Tendai Buddhist. The pivotal episode in his life, recorded on the memorial stone erected by his students, was a twenty-one-day retreat of fasting and meditation on Mount Kurama, near Kyoto, in the early 1920s, during which he reported a profound awakening and the sense of receiving the capacity to heal through a “great spiritual energy.” In April 1922 Usui settled in the Harajuku district of Aoyama, Tokyo, and founded the Usui Reiki Ryoho Gakkai, a society through which he taught the method and gave treatments.

According to his memorial inscription he taught Reiki to over two thousand people during his lifetime; among his students was the naval physician Chujiro Hayashi, who refined the clinical teaching that later reached the West.

While travelling to teach in Fukuyama, Usui suffered a stroke and died on 9 March 1926; he is buried at Saihoji temple in Suginami, Tokyo. The proposed mechanism of Reiki — a transferable “universal life energy” channelled through the practitioner’s hands — has no accepted scientific basis; what is real and well-documented is the relaxation, calm, and comfort that gentle touch and attentive presence reliably produce, effects also explicable by placebo and the therapeutic relationship.