Cho Ku Rei — the first Reiki symbol

Cho Ku Rei is usually the first Reiki symbol people come across, and it's often simply called the power symbol. In Reiki it's used to strengthen and direct the Reiki force and to anchor spiritual forces in matter. What's remarkable about this symbol is that, unlike the other three, it isn't a written character at all. In this article I'd like to explain what's behind its name.

Which kanji fit Cho Ku Rei 勅令・直靈

The pronunciation choku rei is so clearly Sino-Japanese that there must be Chinese characters for it. That doesn't mean you could replace the symbol with kanji, though. The question is which characters fit. For choku there are three possible kanji, 直・勅・捗, and for rei well over twenty. Luckily only a few combinations form actual words, and only two of those have anything to do with the symbol.

An ensouled word from Shintō 言靈

Since the term is so closely tied to the Tennō, I was fairly sure it would turn up in much older texts. The earliest work I could find is the Engi shiki 延喜式, a collection of rituals and regulations of the imperial court from the 10th century. It also contains the oldest surviving collection of norito, the ritual prayers of Shintō. There, choku rei is described as kotodama 言靈, an ensouled word whose recitation releases spiritual power. It's roughly comparable to a mantra. What I find fascinating is that the text also describes how the imperial mandate follows another sign to breathe its effect into it. More background in the article on kotodama.

By the way, Japan still has shrine festivals called chokusai 勅祭, at which an imperial envoy (chokushi 勅使) brings the Tennō's greetings to a shrine and its kami.

The inner kami 一靈四魂

Old Shintō (Japanese: koshintō) holds that a human being isn't just part of the great universe but a small universe in its own right. Inside works an enlivening power that comes directly from the kami and without which a person couldn't live. Around this power, in four directions, a kind of mandala, sit four souls: the soul of the wondrous (kushimitama 奇魂), the soul of happiness (sakimitama 幸魂), the soul of harmony (nigimitama 和魂) and the soul of roughness (aramitama 荒魂). They're nourished by this inner power, which is also called naohi and written with the very same characters, 直靈. That explains nicely why the Cho Ku Rei symbol can anchor subtle forces in matter.

Three traditions in one symbol 神仏道

If you write the name of the sun kami Amaterasu in kanji, 天照大神, her name is purely Japanese in sound and Chinese in script. Together with her identification with Dainichi Nyorai, that gives us a link between Shintō, Daoism and Buddhism, and it's exactly in these traditions, and in Shugendō, which brings their magical sides together, that the origins of the Cho Ku Rei symbol lie. In Japan people realized early on that one being of light can appear in another, which is why the traditions were joined rather than pushing each other out.

Where the boost comes from 今

If you only describe Cho Ku Rei as an amplifier, one question stays open: why does it amplify at all? For me the answer is in the second part of the name. Rei 靈 stands for the spiritual, and the symbol brings that spiritual power, the Reiki power, into the here and now, very focused, in this exact moment. That's where the amplifying effect comes from. Put simply, it's a bit like sunlight under a magnifying glass: it's the same light, but gathered into one point it has a very different strength.

That's also why Cho Ku Rei is combined with the other symbols. With Sei He Ki, it sets the direction for where that symbol's spiritual power should work. With distance Reiki, the distance symbol Hon Sha Ze Shō Nen isn't enough on its own to make the connection. Cho Ku Rei fixes the direction to the person, and from there the spiritual power goes straight to them.

The spiral in the character for kami 神

The symbol's shape is a spiral, and spirals in Japan are anything but random. Several times in Japan I've come across special ways of writing the character 神 (kami) in which the right-hand part is drawn as a spiral, for example on stone steles at Fushimi Inari in Kyoto. I read that as a hint that the power of a spirit is called in through the spiral. It fits Cho Ku Rei very well, since its name already carries the spiritual in it.

Cho Ku Rei in Shingon Reiki 修行

How to write and use the symbol belongs in the initiation, where it's passed on in the right context. I've described Cho Ku Rei in detail in my chapters of the German-language Das große Buch der Reiki-Symbole. For an overview of all four symbols, see the article on the Reiki symbols. Would you have guessed that the imperial court and the sun kami Amaterasu stand behind the simplest Reiki symbol?