My Path to Shingon Reiki

I was maybe eight or nine the first time I saw Chinese characters. In a film — I don't remember which one. But I remember the feeling. These characters didn't look like letters. They looked like gates. Like something you could open. And then, a few years later, I saw a fighter in a martial-arts film forming finger seals — and I knew: there is something real behind this. I knew it before anyone confirmed it.

That certainty — that behind the images, behind the films, behind the stories there is a real tradition — has never let go of me. It brought me to Japan. It led me into temples. It turned the kid who used to stare at characters into a Japanese-studies scholar who spent three years researching in Kyoto. And eventually it led to what I now call Shingon Reiki.

The Fascination That Started It All 始

Maybe you know this feeling. You see something — in a film, in a book, in an anime — and your body reacts before your mind can name it. A tingle. A hunch. A quiet knowing: there is more. For me it was East Asian script. And the finger seals of the ninja. I had no explanation for why this gripped me so completely. I was a kid in the Black Forest, far from Japan. But the fascination was real. And it was stubborn.

Years later, as a young man, I started studying Japanese Studies. Not because someone advised me to. Because I wanted to find out whether what I had sensed as a child had a real basis. Whether these characters can actually carry power. Whether the finger seals actually work. The academic path was the one I chose — but the drive was not academic. It was deeply personal.

Three Years in Japan 京都

When I went to Japan — to Kyoto, to the university — I thought I was going as a researcher. I arrived with books, dictionaries and the ambition to translate source texts. What I did not expect: that the research would lead me into temples where the texts were still alive. Where monks practised what the manuscripts described. Where the Siddham characters were not lying in display cases but were written on talismans and used in rituals.

In Kyoto my understanding shifted. I had expected to find old texts. Instead I found living practice. Shingon monks who did not just explain mandalas but meditated inside them. Mountain ascetics on Yoshino who saw Kuji Kiri not as a historical curiosity but as a daily tool. A Zen monk with whom I studied calligraphy and who taught me that the brushstroke reveals the inner state — unfiltered, incorruptible.

The dissertation that grew from this — The Siddham in Japanese Art — Rituals of Healing — was the academic expression of what I had lived through during those years. I documented how, for more than 1,200 years in Japan, written characters have been used as carriers of spiritual power. But behind the documentation there was always the personal experience: these characters work. Not because a text claims so. Because I experienced it.

The 88 Temples of Shikoku 四国

There is a pilgrimage in Japan that wasn't built for tourists. 88 temples on the island of Shikoku, connected by a walking route of about 1,200 kilometres. Traditionally you walk it. In white clothing, with a bamboo hat and a pilgrim's staff. The path takes 30 to 60 days — depending on how fast you walk and how long you linger in the temples.

I walked this path. On foot. Temple by temple. Day by day. What happens on this path is hard to put into words. It is not spectacular. No visions, no miracles. Instead: a slow, deep transformation. The body moves. The mind grows still. The landscape shifts — mountains, coast, rice fields, forests. And at some point you notice that it is not only the landscape that has changed. You have changed.

The Shikoku Pilgrimage showed me something no book could give me: that the path is the practice. Not the arrival. Not the insight at the end. The next step. And the next. And the next. That sounds simple. It is the hardest thing I have ever done. And the most important.

Ninjutsu and the Other Side 忍術

Parallel to the academic research and the Buddhist practice, there was another thread in my life: Ninjutsu. I became the successor of Taguchi Sensei and received the transmission as grandmaster. That sounds more dramatic than it feels. In reality, it is mostly responsibility.

Ninjutsu gave me something decisive: the union of body and mind as a practical principle, not a philosophical concept. The finger seals that had fascinated me as a child — Kuji Kiri — were living practice here. Nine signs, nine powers, embedded in a system of movement, breath and meditation. The Kuji do not come solely from Buddhism — their roots reach into shamanic Daoism, Shugendō, and the mountain-ascetic tradition of the Yamabushi.

This range — Buddhism, Daoism, Shintō, Shugendō, martial arts — is not a contradiction. In Japan these traditions were never as strictly separated as Western thought tends to imagine. A monk could also be a mountain ascetic. A warrior could meditate. A scholar could know the finger seals of the ninja. Within me these threads wove together — not as eclectic collecting, but as an organic growth, where each tradition deepened the next.

How Shingon Reiki Came Into Being 真言靈氣

Shingon Reiki did not appear in a single day. It grew over more than 25 years — out of research, out of practice, out of experience in Japanese temples and on Japanese mountains. It is the attempt to recover what Reiki once was, before it was simplified in the West into a hands-on technique.

At the core of Shingon Reiki is the return to the source. To the Shingon tradition. To the three mysteries — body, speech, and mind. To the Siddham characters that underlie the Reiki symbols. To the mantras that do not work as pretty sounds, but as keys to cosmic forces. To the recognition that Reiki is not a wellness tool, but a path of spiritual development.

Eileen and the Shared Path 共

For some years now, I have not been walking this path alone. Eileen Wiesmann — historian, Shingon Reiki master, shamanic practitioner — brings a perspective that complements and expands my own. Where I research, she senses. Where I search in texts, she finds through direct experience. This is not a contrast — it is a double helix, in which academic depth and lived practice wind around each other.

Together we are writing the new Shingon Reiki book. Together we offer initiations and spiritual journeys to Japan. And together we are building a community — the Spiritual Master Paths community — for people who don't just want to do Reiki, but want to walk the whole path.

To You 君

If you've read this far, it may be because you recognised yourself somewhere. Maybe you were also the child who stared at characters. Maybe you sensed something in an anime that you couldn't explain. Maybe you've already tried Reiki and thought: there has to be more.

There is more. And it is not a secret — it is a tradition. A tradition that lives in Japanese temples, that is preserved in old manuscripts, and that becomes alive again every day in the practice of people who walk the path. What you sensed as a child was right. It is still there. And the path is open.