Qigong and Reiki

When people think of Qigong, they usually picture someone in a park early in the morning, moving slowly and smoothly. When they think of Reiki, they picture hands resting on a person lying on a table. At first glance these look like two very different things from two different countries. Look a little closer, though, and you find a surprising amount of common ground. That's what this article is about.

A Japanese reference book on Qigong counts Mikao Usui among the greatest Japanese Qigong masters of the 20th century, as someone who founded his own style with Reiki. For a Japanese reader that isn't such a strange label, because in Japan methods like these are simply called kikō 氣功, which is the Japanese reading of Qigong.

Ki and Qi: one character, two readings 氣

It gets interesting when you take the old full form 氣 apart. At the bottom sits the character for rice 米, and above it the rising steam 气. The picture is simple: when rice is cooked, steam rises, and in the same way the force that keeps us alive rises out of our food. That's also why I stick with the old spelling. In the modern short form 気, the rice is gone. That picture only explains the old character, though. It doesn't mean that every ki or qi is the same energy.

Qigong and shamanic Daoism know several kinds of energy. You can take in energy through good food, through the breath and through exercises, and not only from the air, but also from a rock, an amethyst or a tree, from the earth, from heaven and from your surroundings. You can channel it through yourself and pass it on, to help yourself and others. Reiki works differently. Through the initiation you take in spiritual life energy through the crown of your head, it is channeled through you and comes out of your hands. The methods for working with energy were refined in East Asia over many centuries. Today a lot of them are grouped under the word Qigong, even though the word only really caught on in this sense in the 20th century.

What Usui drew on 源流

Mikao Usui was at home in Japan's spiritual traditions. That includes the esoteric Buddhism of Shingon (mikkyō), which Kūkai brought from China to Japan in the early 9th century. It includes Shugendō, the path of the mountain ascetics, shamanic Daoism with its breath and energy exercises, and of course Shintō with its purification rites and its connection to the kami. Each of these traditions works with energy in its own way, and each with its own kinds of energy. In Shingon, for example, through mantra, mudra and meditation, and in Daoism through guiding the breath and through movement.

In my book on Reiki in therapeutic practice I describe a point that's very interesting here. Before Usui had his experience in the Kurama mountains, he apparently knew methods in which you first have to gather Ki in the hara before you can pass it on. The hara sits about two finger-widths below and behind the navel, and it's well known from Chinese Qigong. Usui was looking for a way to work without this gathering first. In other words, Reiki grew out of the world of these energy practices, and at the same time it made something new out of them.

Even so, the Qigong elements are easy to spot in the Reiki that has come down from Usui's circle. Jōshin Kokyū Hō is a breathing practice in which the hara plays a central role, and Hatsurei Hō is a meditation that awakens the spiritual force. How old these techniques are in their present form is hard to pin down. You'll find more on what the sources actually support in the article on Japanese Reiki techniques.

Why the two are often seen as separate today 分

Hawayo Takata received her initiations from Chūjirō Hayashi in Tokyo in the 1930s and went back to Hawaii in 1937. From there, Reiki spread through America and Europe over the following decades. Along the way, laying on hands moved to the center, and in many lineages the breathing and meditation practices played a smaller role. There are very practical reasons for that. For a long time the Japanese, Chinese and Sanskrit sources were hardly accessible outside Japan.

To me this is a question of emphasis. The force that flows through the hands is the same, whatever lineage someone was initiated in. If you're curious about the link to Qigong, though, you'll find it in the roots Usui drew on, and not necessarily in the hand positions alone.

Qigong and Reiki in Shingon Reiki 真言靈氣

In Shingon Reiki, breath, hara and meditation are a natural part of the practice. The hands stay at the heart of it, but the body is more than a receiver. It takes part as a resonating space. How this is practiced in detail belongs to the shared practice in the community and at the live events, because a text can only carry so much of it.

I didn't make this connection up. I came across it in Japanese and Chinese texts, in the Shingon writings and in the practice of the temples I visited again and again during my roughly three years of research at Kyoto University. It's a bit like two trails up the same mountain. If you know both sides, you understand the mountain better.

If you'd like to go deeper into the link between breath and energy, the article on Qigong breathing in Reiki practice has more, and the overview of Shingon Reiki shows how it all fits together. Do you already practice Qigong or Reiki yourself, and have you ever felt how closely the two are related in your own hands?