My Path to Shingon Reiki

As a child I was fascinated by Chinese characters. To me they looked like sacred symbols, and I wanted to know what was behind them. At thirteen, in Bremen, where I grew up, a Japanese school opened in our neighborhood. I went there and asked whether anyone could teach me karate. We came to an arrangement, karate lessons in exchange for German lessons, and that's how I started learning Japanese.

At eighteen I traveled to Japan for the first time. Looking back, a lot of what came later already started with this simple exchange.

How I came to Reiki 始

I've been practicing Reiki since 1993. How I came to it is a story I still like to tell. During my civilian service I looked after an elderly lady whose flowers stayed fresh for weeks, much longer than usual. When I asked her about it, she told me that she laid her hands on them. I was skeptical, but I wanted to find out through my own experience what was true about it. So I started with Reiki myself.

To this day, the first thing I do every morning after waking up is lay my hands on myself, to wake up and start the day relaxed and motivated.

Calligraphy and Heidelberg 書

I studied East Asian art history and Japanese studies in Heidelberg. During that time I practiced calligraphy every day with the Zen monk Hoon Kenmyo, whom I had found through a note on a university bulletin board. I still remember my first lesson very clearly. When I wrote with his brush, I had the feeling that the brush was guiding my hand and not the other way around.

Calligraphy taught me something that later became very important for my understanding of the Reiki symbols. A character isn't just a sign that you read. It has a pronunciation, a structure and a history, and when you write it, your inner state shows in every stroke.

Kyoto 京都

Thanks to two scholarships I was able to research at Kyoto University for about three years. My research focused on Buddhist art, architecture and rituals, and it took me into temples very often. There I discovered the original form of one of the Reiki symbols, written in the Siddham script (Bonji in Japanese) of esoteric Buddhism. This discovery became the basis for my master's thesis and later for my dissertation in Heidelberg.

What fascinated me most in those years was that the characters weren't only lying in display cases. They were written on talismans and used in rituals. In other words, the tradition I had read about in books was still being practiced.

The 88 temples of Shikoku 四国

It was my professor in Kyoto who recommended that I walk the Shikoku pilgrimage, the route to 88 temples on the island where Kūkai was born. My first attempt didn't go as planned. After about ten days I had to give up at temple 24. A year later I set off again in August and walked all 88 temples on foot, which took me somewhere between thirty and forty days.

In the heat and with sore feet, I often recited the mantra of the Medicine Buddha, and it carried me through many difficult stretches. My professor later gave me a statue of the Medicine Buddha, which still means a lot to me. For me, the pilgrimage showed very concretely that the path itself is the practice.

Ninjutsu 忍術

Alongside research and Buddhist practice, martial arts have always been part of my life. For me, martial art is a way to peace. In Osaka I found my Ninjutsu master, Grandmaster Taguchi Sensei, and today I'm his successor. That sounds more dramatic than it feels, because above all it means responsibility.

Through Ninjutsu I also came into contact with Kuji Kiri, the nine signs, which have their first sources in China. Over the centuries they came to Japan in several waves and developed there into a system of their own, combining Daoism, Japanese folk magic and Shingon mikkyō. In Japan these traditions were never strictly separated. A monk could also be a mountain ascetic, and a warrior could meditate.

How Shingon Reiki came about 真言靈氣

I started using the name Shingon Reiki around 2005. It was never my aim to found a new Reiki style. What I wanted was to go back to the sources that Usui himself drew on, esoteric Buddhism (Shingon), Shugendō, Shintō and shamanic Daoism, and to bring their practices into Reiki again, the three mysteries of body, speech and mind, the Siddham behind the Reiki symbols, and the mantras.

I wrote my chapters in Das große Buch der Reiki-Symbole (2004, updated edition 2016) and later the book Reiki in der therapeutischen Praxis, in which the symbols appear in updated form. Today I share this path with my partner Eileen Wiesmann.

To you 君

If you've read this far, maybe you recognize something of yourself in my story. Maybe you were also fascinated by characters as a child, or you've practiced Reiki for a while and have the feeling that there's more to discover. What first drew you to Reiki?