Sei He Ki — the seed syllable behind the symbol

Sei He Ki is the symbol my research started with. During my time at Kyoto University I found its original form in temples, a seed syllable in the Siddham script (Bonji in Japanese). That became the basis for my master's thesis and my doctoral dissertation. In Reiki, Sei He Ki is often called the symbol for the mental and emotional level. What it actually means becomes clear once you look closely at its origin, its pronunciation and its parts.

A seed syllable from the Siddham script 悉曇

When the Buddhist scriptures were written down in Sanskrit after centuries of oral transmission, the old Indian Siddham script was used for it. Besides working as letters, individual Siddham characters carry a sacred meaning in their shape and sound. They're then called seed syllables (Sanskrit: bīja; Japanese: shuji 種子). The Sei He Ki symbol is one of these seed syllables, namely hrīḥ. I think it's likely that Usui altered its shape a little before taking it into Reiki.

The seed syllable hrīḥ is one of the few Siddham that stand for several beings of light at once: Amida Nyorai, the Buddha of the Western Paradise, and Senju Kannon, the thousand-armed Bodhisattva of compassion. In Japanese art you often see Kannon carrying the soul of a deceased person on a lotus blossom to Amida's paradise. The two work hand in hand, so to speak. More on Kannon in the article on Kannon.

The pronunciation 正癖

This is where it gets fascinating. Even though the symbol is a Siddham, its name has a Japanese rather than an Indian pronunciation: sei heki. A Japanese pronunciation means there should be matching characters. If you write sei heki in kanji, you get 正癖. 正 sei means to correct or set right. 癖 heki is a habit, but a particular kind: one that causes suffering. You can even see that in the character, because it contains 疒, the element you also find in 病, illness. So together the characters mean "correcting habits that cause suffering." Translating 癖 as just "habit" misses the point, since Japanese uses other characters for habits in the neutral sense, such as 習慣 shūkan. Put simply, the Indian seed syllable was given a Japanese pronunciation that tells you its job in Reiki.

You might suspect that sei heki is a Japanese translation of hrīḥ. But that's not the case either. When the Siddham reached China, people there already found them hard to pronounce. So each syllable was assigned Chinese characters meant only to render its sound. For hrīḥ these are 紇利. In Japan the pronunciation was then Japanized once more, and hrīḥ became kiriku. It's a bit like the English word milk, which Japanese people say as miruku, because Japanese almost always puts a vowel between two consonants. So kiriku and 紇利 have nothing to do with sei heki. That's why you can't get from the symbol to the pronunciation, or from the pronunciation to the symbol.

The syllable hrīḥ, piece by piece 紇利

The Kongōchō kyō sutra explains the meanings of the Siddham, and Kūkai wrote further commentaries on it. They make clear that to understand a Siddham you have to break it down into its parts. It's a bit like numbers. The digits 1, 2 and 3 are each numbers on their own, and together they make a new number, 123. The syllable hrīḥ breaks down into four Siddham: ha, ra, ī and aḥ.

Together these syllables serve to loosen the mind's attachments caused by so-called afflictive emotions such as envy, anger, jealousy, greed and illusion. Applied to Reiki, it's about habits that stand in the way of happiness and contentment and bring suffering. That's exactly what 正癖 means.

Where Sei He Ki comes in 癖

What I find fascinating is the question of where these habits come from. In my view, many of them grow out of imprints and beliefs formed in childhood. Just as an example: if you kept hearing as a child "You can't do anything," "You're not good enough" or "You're too stupid for that," it's easy to turn that into the belief that you're never enough. Sometimes it flips into the opposite, the feeling that you have to be perfect and keep proving yourself. Both cost you your sense of self-worth, bring suffering and lead to more behavior that feeds that suffering.

That's exactly where Sei He Ki comes in, at the old imprint the habit keeps growing back from. In other words, the symbol can open up room for something to settle at the root. So calling it the mental or emotional symbol is understandable, but the name itself says more.

How Usui took the symbol over 符

Usui changed the shape of the seed syllable slightly and its pronunciation considerably. In my view he did this before bringing the symbol into Reiki, using an old Daoist method of making talismans that was taken into Shingon Buddhism very early on. That way he could keep the symbol's function intact while making it easy to use. Here, too, you can see the broad roots of Reiki: esoteric Buddhism, Daoism, Shugendō and Shintō.

Sei He Ki in Shingon Reiki 修行

In Shingon Reiki the symbol is practiced together with its background, that is, with Amida Nyorai and Senju Kannon, whom the seed syllable stands for. How to work with the symbol belongs in the initiation, where it's passed on in the right context. I've written about the symbol 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 wondered why this symbol looks so different from the others?