Dr. Chujiro Hayashi – Celebrating Reiki’s Lineage

Reiki’s lineage is one that is full of incredible individuals who have contributed so much to the practice. One of the most influential of these individuals is a man by the name of Dr. Chujiro Hayashi – an original lineage founder of Usui Reiki.

Dr. Hayashi graduated from Navy School in December 1902. Afterward, he would go on to serve as a doctor and an officer in the Japanese Navy.

Dr. Hayashi was 47 years old in 1925 when he first met the original founder of Reiki, Dr. Usui, and began to train alongside him. It is believed that Dr. Hayashi was one of the last Reiki Masters ever trained by Dr. Usui, and in 1926 when Mikao Usui passed away it was Dr. Hayashi who took over his practice.

In more ways than one, Dr. Hayashi was instrumental in helping bring Reiki to the Western world. For one, he was the person who trained Mrs. Takata – the woman who brought Reiki to the West by opening up several clinics in Hawaii and ensured Reiki was able to survive the strict regulatory requirements that threatened to eliminate it. In addition to this, though, Dr. Hayashi also helped develop the hand position system of healing that went on to gain a lot of traction in the West.

After being trained by Dr. Usui, Dr. Hayashi left the Usui practice and opened his own practice in Tokyo that he called “Hayashi Reiki Kenkyu-Kai”. Here, there were eight beds and sixteen healers, and each patient that came in was assigned two healers to treat them simultaneously. During his time at his clinic, Dr. Hayashi continued to develop Reiki, using the knowledge of medicine that he gained during his time as a doctor in the Navy to expand Reiki and make the healing aspects of it more effective. He kept very precise records of each of his patient’s conditions, as well as records of how they responded to various treatments. Using those records as a basis, Dr. Hayashi developed a 40-page manual on how hand positions could be used in treatment.

While Dr. Usui focused primarily on the healing benefits of head positions, it was Dr. Hayashi’s work with hand positions that led the hand position healing aspects of Reiki into the mainstream. It was also these hand position treatments that gained a large following in the Western world – a following they still enjoy to this day.

In addition to providing the world with new methods of healing and developing Reiki into a more effective practice, Dr. Hayashi was also able to train about 17 Reiki Masters during his time at the Hayashi Reiki Kenkyu-Kai clinic – including the ultra-influential Mrs. Takata. Refusing to perpetuate violence in the world by joining the Japanese war efforts during WWII, Dr. Hayashi ended his own life by committing Seppuku’ on May 10th, 1940.

Today, Dr. Hayashi is honorably remembered as a man who was invaluable in helping make Reiki the system that we enjoy today. His contributions to Reiki, both through the methods he developed and the Masters that he trained, have proven to be instrumental in shaping Reiki into a more widespread and effective practice. In addition to this, the many people that Dr. Hayashi and his healers helped treat at his Hayashi Reiki Kenkyu-Kai clinic are all individual testaments of the great purpose that Dr. Hayashi served during his remarkable life.