Hon Sha Ze Sho Nen — five kanji in one symbol

Hon Sha Ze Sho Nen is the most elaborate of the four Reiki symbols. Strictly speaking, it joins five Chinese characters into a single sign. In Reiki it's known as the symbol for working across distance. Why it suits that purpose becomes clear once you look closely at its pronunciation, the hidden kanji and the shape of the symbol.

The pronunciation 棒読み

The symbol is read hon sha ze shō nen. The little line over the o in shō means that this o is long; all the other syllables are short. The z in ze is a soft, voiced s, the same as in Zen. The reading is Buddhist: the characters are read the way mantras and sutras are read, in one go with Sino-Japanese pronunciation. This way of reading is called bō yomi 棒読み, literally "stick reading." If you read the characters as a Japanese sentence, it would sound completely different.

The hidden kanji 本者是正念

From the pronunciation you can conclude that five kanji are hidden in the symbol, and with a character dictionary you really do find them: 本 hon, 者 sha, 是 ze, 正 shō and 念 nen. Many people who work with the Reiki symbols have found these characters on their own. If you've done that detective work, congratulations. But this is exactly where a trap lies, one that gave me a headache for a long time. Dictionaries give very different meanings:

Try building a meaningful sentence out of these meanings. How many possibilities did you come up with? Can you really say that one of them is the right one? Reading meanings into the characters is more like playing the lottery, and it leads away from the original sense.

A Chinese sentence 文

You get further by checking which characters form a word together and whether there's a sentence structure. Since all five characters are kanji and no Japanese syllabic signs appear, this is a sentence in classical Chinese, where a sentence can do without a verb. A famous example comes from Confucius, who, asked how to govern a state, answered: 君君臣臣父父子子, literally "ruler ruler, subject subject, father father, son son," meaning roughly: let the ruler act as befits a ruler, the subject as befits a subject, and so on.

Since around the third century, the third character, ze 是, has been used like the verb "to be." Many Japanese kitchens still have the calligraphy 日日是好日, literally "day day this good day," or in plain English, "every day is a good day." For the symbol this gives the construction "honsha is shōnen." The last two characters form the Buddhist word shōnen 正念. In the Eightfold Path it stands for right mindfulness, and in a nutshell it can be translated as Buddha consciousness. Whole treatises have been written about this word. So this is how I translate the symbol:

So the point is that awakening lies right at our feet. You may know this state from giving Reiki, when over time you sink more and more into the flow of the power, stop thinking and simply rest in your own being. For Buddha consciousness, space and time don't matter, and that explains why the symbol is used for working across distance. More in the article on distance Reiki.

Writing the five kanji nested into one another as a single sign isn't anything new, by the way. This way of writing comes from Daoist shamanism, it's often used for talismans, and you also find it in the special way the name of the Lotus Sutra is written. So there's nothing secret about it. If you know the characters, you can simply read the sentence.

The shape of a pagoda 塔

In my experience, deep insights can come from writing the symbols meditatively. Many years ago, while writing this symbol countless times, it suddenly struck me that its shape closely resembles a pagoda. A pagoda has several stories with sweeping roofs, and the symbol has three sweeping lines on the left and two on the right. A pagoda also has a central pillar (Japanese: shinbashira 心柱, literally "heart pillar") that sticks out of the top, and you can see the same in the symbol. Its last three strokes are an abbreviation of the character for heart, 心.

Beneath the heart pillar of a pagoda rests the relic of the Buddha. The pagodas of esoteric Buddhism are three-dimensional mandalas with Dainichi Nyorai at the center. Yes, you read that right: inside the distance symbol there's a kind of little temple with the cosmic Buddha in the middle. This also shows its connection to the master symbol, Dai Ko Myo.

Five elements 五行

The five kanji can also be assigned to the five phases of Chinese natural philosophy: 本 to wood, 者 to fire, 是 to earth, 正 to metal and 念 to water. That's exactly the order of the cycle in which wood feeds fire, fire feeds earth, earth feeds metal, metal feeds water and water feeds wood again. That's why I think it's very likely that Usui created this symbol himself, as a Chinese sentence but in Japan and according to very specific criteria. In any case, I haven't been able to find it in the Buddhist sutras so far, while the master symbol appears there countless times.

Hon Sha Ze Sho Nen in Shingon Reiki 修行

How to write and use the symbol belongs in the initiation. I've described it in detail in my chapters of the German-language Das große Buch der Reiki-Symbole, and in updated form in Reiki in der therapeutischen Praxis. For an overview of all four symbols, see the article on the Reiki symbols. Have you ever spotted the pagoda in the symbol yourself?