Dai Ko Myo — the Great Radiant Light

Dai Ko Myo is the master symbol of Reiki. In Reiki it stands for the initiations and for awakening the mind of enlightenment and a person's Buddha nature. Unlike the distance symbol, you don't have to hunt for hidden characters here, because the three kanji stand openly and, as is usual in Chinese writing, are written with a small gap between them. Together they mean "great light" or "great enlightenment." In this article I'd like to explain what's in each character and why the symbol leads straight to Dainichi Nyorai.

The three kanji 大光明

As with the distance symbol, the pronunciation here is Buddhist. Written and spoken the way it is in Reiki, the term appears in the Buddhist sutras countless times.

Sun and moon 日月

Daoism has the idea that the sun stands for the male principle, yang, and the moon for the female principle, yin. In the character myō the two are united. When the sutras were translated from Sanskrit into Chinese, Daoism had long been widespread in China. I think the translators knew exactly what they were doing, because esoteric Buddhism has something very similar, namely Dainichi Nyorai himself. He's neither only male nor only female; he embodies both.

Dainichi Nyorai and the mandalas of the two realms 両界曼荼羅

You can see this in the two great mandalas of Shingon. In the mandala of the Womb Realm (Japanese: taizōkai 胎蔵界) and the mandala of the Diamond Realm (Japanese: kongōkai 金剛界), Dainichi Nyorai sits at the center, surrounded by many beings of light. The womb stands for the female, the diamond for the male. In India there were two schools of esoteric Buddhism, each based on one of the two mandalas. Shingon, however, says: "The two mandalas are two and yet one." Kūkai's master Huiguo had received both lineages and passed them on to Kūkai.

Many years ago a Shingon monk explained it to me like this: the right hand holds the Diamond Realm mandala and the left hand the Womb Realm mandala. In the universe the two are inseparable, which is why they're shown united in the wisdom-fist gesture (Japanese: chiken-in 智拳印) that the Diamond Realm Dainichi holds in front of his heart. In the Womb Realm mandala, on the other hand, Dainichi Nyorai shows the gesture of meditation. More about him in the article on Dainichi Nyorai, and about the mandalas in Mandalas and Reiki.

Sun, moon and Venus in the Kurama mountains 鞍馬

In East Asian literature the moon was called the "light of the noble" very early on, and moon viewing at night is still popular today, for romantic evenings as much as for meditation. When Usui meditated in the Kurama mountains, he did so day and night. By day he had the sun, and by night the moon. My own take is that his meditation was related to the planet Venus, which, like the moon, becomes visible through the sun's light. So he drew inspiration from the sun, the moon and Venus, and after 21 days came to his experience of the great radiant light. More in the article on Kurama.

The syllable A 阿

The seed syllable of the Womb Realm Dainichi Nyorai is the Siddham syllable A (Bonji in Japanese), the primordial syllable that, in Shingon's understanding, contains everything. One of Shingon's most important meditations, the ajikan 阿字観, focuses on exactly this syllable.

Dai Ko Myo in Shingon Reiki 修行

How to write and work with the master symbol belongs in the initiation. I've described it 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. Have you ever noticed the sun and moon in the character myō?