What Really Happened to Mikao Usui on Kurama?
For years, in meditation, I have asked Mikao Usui the same question… What really happened to you on Kurama?
Not because I want another Reiki origin story. We already have plenty of those! Over the years the story has become almost cinematic. Mikao Usui goes up Mount Kurama, fasts for 21 days, something extraordinary happens on the final day, struck by lightening and Reiki is born… I have never felt completely satisfied with that.
The deeper I have gone into Usui Reiki Ryoho, Japanese practice and Usui himself, the less I see Kurama as the place where a man suddenly received a healing ability. I think something much bigger happened and recently, after asking this question for years, I had an experience that changed the way I understood it.
I was shown a piece of slate.
It was covered in words, scratches and marks. Then I heard “Look.” The slate was wiped completely clean. Then came the words “I wiped the slate clean.” After that, the image changed into something incredibly familiar to me. An Etch A Sketch from childhood. I could see the slider moving across it and everything disappearing. One moment it was full, the next, clear.
That image has stayed with me because it expressed something I have struggled to put into words throughout all of my research and the writing of my audiobook about Mikao Usui. Perhaps Kurama wasn't about gaining something. Maybe it was about losing something. Not losing himself but losing everything that prevented him from knowing his true and purest nature.
21 days, not one moment
One of the strongest things that came through while I was writing and recording my audiobook was that we focus far too heavily on the final moment… Day 21. As though the first twenty days were merely Usui waiting around for the important bit to happen. I don't believe that anymore, in this experience, I understood the whole period on Kurama as significant. The days themselves were the practice.
fasting
physical weakness
breathing
sitting
mountain
cold and warmth
sounds around him
thoughts that would have arisen and passed
things he carried into Kurama with him
learning
disappointments
searching
identity
Even his ideas about what he thought he was trying to find, layer after layer until eventually there may have been very little left to hold onto. That is what the slate showed me. Not twenty days of waiting followed by enlightenment on day 21. It was twenty one days of being stripped back and I also received very clearly that he walked down on the 22nd day. I need to make an important distinction here. I am not claiming that as documented Reiki history. I don't have a lost diary belonging to Usui sitting in a drawer in Durham! This is something I experienced personally.
There is a difference but the distinction between the twenty one days and the following day altered something in my understanding. Because enlightenment, awakening, insight, whatever language we choose, is not terribly useful if it can only exist on a mountain. Eventually you have to walk back down and perhaps that is one of the most important parts of the Usui story.
Coming down the mountain
I spent a huge amount of time with this while creating my audiobook. Usui didn't remain on Kurama, he had to come back into human life, into streets, relationships, illness, work, frustration, back to ordinary people with ordinary problems and somewhere between the mountain and everything that followed, an experience became a Ryoho, a way of practice.
Usui Reiki Ryoho was never only about somebody lying on a treatment table while another person puts their hands on them. There is a powerful system of self cultivation here.
The Gokai
Meditation
Hara breath
Gassho
Reiju
Waka
Hands on practice
Beneath all of those things, something that is much harder to package into a weekend course… Who are you underneath everything you have written on the slate? That question takes me back to Kurama again and again.
Maybe Usui wasn't searching for Reiki
This is maybe the biggest change in my own understanding. I don't imagine Mikao Usui climbing Kurama thinking… I am going to invent Reiki Ryoho. “Reiki” was not necessarily the object hidden at the top of the mountain waiting to be found and the deeper I go into practice, the stranger that idea seems. Perhaps what happened was not Usui receiving an external substance, power or special energy. Maybe something became apparent when enough of everything else had fallen away.
His own nature.
Life itself.
The lack of separation we usually spend our lives creating.
Mind and body no longer fighting one another.
The person searching and the thing being searched for no longer standing on opposite sides.
That is very different from the story of a healing power entering somebody in one single moment and it changes how I understand the word Reiki in practice. It is one reason I increasingly say that we don't merely do Reiki, there is a condition of being within this system, a deep cultivation of the human being. Usui's genius, to me, may not have been that he possessed something nobody else possessed. It may have been that he found ways of helping ordinary people recognise and cultivate something that cannot really be owned in the first place.
The spiritual soil beneath Reiki
While researching the audiobook I kept coming back to the world and environment Usui lived within.
Japanese Buddhism Mikkyo.
Shinto.
Shugendo, mountain practice.
Ideas of purification and cultivation.
None of this means Reiki is secretly Shingon Buddhism or that we can take a Buddhist ritual and declare it the missing Reiki technique. I think we have to be far more careful than that but neither did Mikao Usui appear out of a cultural vacuum and Japanese spiritual practice already understood something that Western Reiki sometimes struggles with:
You cannot think your way into or out of everything. Eventually the body has to know, the breath has to know and eventually practice has to move out of the book. Maybe Kurama was exactly that for Usui. Not another piece of information, but the end of information being enough.
My autistic experience of this
I also have to acknowledge the way I experience all of this. I am autistic. I don't believe autism automatically makes somebody psychic, enlightened or spiritually advanced, but maybe it does a little! but my own autistic mind does experience life expansively. I see patterns everywhere, i connect subjects that may initially appear unrelated and become absorbed in something for years and continue moving through layer after layer when somebody else might reasonably have thought, “Leanne, you've probably researched enough Reiki now” Apparently I haven't!
I often understand something visually or as a complete pattern before I can explain it verbally. Sometimes I know the shape of something before I have language for it. That has been present throughout my relationship with Reiki and particularly throughout writing the Usui audiobook. There were moments when research gave me information, other moments when practice gave me understanding and occasionally something arrives that I experience as direct communication. The slate was one of those occasions.
I experience that communication as coming from the consciousness of Mikao Usui, i know it sounds bold but I am comfortable saying that this is what I experience. I don't require anyone reading this to believe the same thing. Nor do I need to convert the experience into historical evidence to give it value. There is enormous freedom in allowing something to remain spiritual experience without turning it into proof.
The samurai and the arrow
This wasn't the first experience I had connected with Usui. During my Master Reiju, years ago, I suddenly saw a man. He was dressed in black and appeared to me as a samurai. He had a bow, he pulled the bowstring back and released an arrow directly towards me. The arrow entered me and it was extremely vivid.
At the time, I did not understand the image. I also didn't yet know about the traditions concerning Usui's samurai ancestry and family lineage that I would encounter later in my Reiki research. When I eventually learned about that aspect of his background, naturally I thought back to the Reiju.
Do I call that proof? No, but I also refuse to pretend I didn't experience it merely because I cannot put it into a footnote. For me the arrow has come to represent something deeper than ancestry anyway.
Precision.
Discipline.
Commitment.
Something that doesn't hover around the edges of your life but goes straight through the centre of you. Maybe that is also a fairly accurate description of what Reiki has done to mine.
Reiju is not about making somebody powerful
This also changed the way I think about Reiju. The further I move into Japanese-rooted Reiki practice, the less interested I am in the idea that a teacher somehow inserts Reiki into a student. Nobody owns Reiki. A teacher isn't standing there with a private supply of spiritual electricity!
Reiju, for me, belongs to something more subtle.
a blessing
an invitation to recognise
Realisation, revelation and emergence
Eventually we have to see and experience for ourselves. Maybe this is why the image of the arrow affected me so deeply. It didn't feel like receiving a superpower, it felt like being pierced by the practice.
The precepts look different from here
The Gokai also began to make much more sense to me when I stopped seeing Reiki primarily as a treatment system.
Just for today.
Do not anger.
Do not worry.
Be grateful.
Be true to your way and your being.
Show compassion to yourself and others.
These aren't decorative Reiki affirmations, they are the practice of Reiki and perhaps they are another way of wiping the slate.
anger writes on it
fear writes on it
identity we defend writes on it
everything we believe we are supposed to be writes on it
history writes on it
other people's expectations write on it
The practice isn't asking us to become blank human beings without personality or emotion. It is asking whether we can see what has been written there without automatically believing that every mark is us and somewhere underneath all the writing there is still the slate.
Perhaps that was Kurama
I will never know exactly what happened to Mikao Usui on Mount Kurama. None of us will and increasingly I think respecting that uncertainty is part of respecting the man himself. We don't need to fill every historical gap. Sometimes the gap should remain a gap, but my relationship with Usui Reiki Ryohohas taught me that uncertainty doesn't prevent practice.
So I hold the historical record in one hand and my own experience in the other. I don't confuse them, but I don't throw either of them away and when I think about Kurama now, I no longer picture a man sitting on a mountain waiting for Reiki to arrive. I picture a human being who had searched, studied, lived, failed, learned, suffered, questioned and continued. Then, for twenty one days, almost everything familiar was progressively taken away and then there was nothing left to chase.
I think that may be why the image affected me as much as it did. Because perhaps the great lesson of Kurama was never… “Here is Reiki.” Maybe it was…. “Look at what remains when everything you thought you needed has been wiped away.” and then came the part I think we sometimes forget… the return. He walked down the mountain. Back amongst people, into an imperfect world and he practised.
For me, that is where Usui Reiki Ryoho really becomes profound. The mountain may show us something, but our life is where we discover whether we have actually understood it.
