शून्यता: What unfolds from emptiness? Thoughts on Reiki and Tendai Buddhism
Teaching Reiki has given me motivation to research the sect of Buddhism known as Tendai (天台宗) to which Mikao Usui (the founder of what we now call Reiki) is said to have belonged. The story of Tendai presents an excellent historiographical challenge since it leads us back to the overlapping of several traditions, namely Ancient Indian philosophy, Chinese Buddhism, and Japanese Buddhism. In China, Tiantai, as it was called, developed from the teachings of Zhiyi (538-97) and Zhanran (711-82). Named for the mountains in which these teachers lived, the school of Tiantai placed extreme importance on the Lotus Sutra and culminated around three key principles:
Eka-yana: “One Vehicle”: Tendai Buddhists seek to understand the inherent unity within the diversity of Buddhist traditions. To study Tendai is to study Buddhism as a whole, while also finding an approach to study and practice that works best for you.
Ichinen sanzen: “Three thousand worlds in One Thought Moment”: Tendai Buddhists seek to understand the interconnectedness of all things
Tathāgata-garbha: “Buddha Nature”: Tendai Buddhist thought and practice is rooted in the notion that all beings possess the infinite potential to discover the truth together.
It was in the sacred mountains that Saicho (767-822) discovered these ideas, and from there he took Tiantai to Japan where it became Tendai. The Lotus Sutra continued to maintain its place of importance in Japan, and it is likely that this particular branch of Buddhist belief and practice influenced Usui, and, in turn, formed the foundations of Reiki’s philosophy.
The Lotus Sutra speaks of a union between “emptiness,” the so-called negative teaching of the Prajnaparamita (usually translated as “The Perfection of Wisdom,” the key text of Mahāyāna Buddhism), and the positive identity of essences. Tendai Buddhists proceed from an understanding that the “thusness” of all things is a meeting between emptiness and form, and this sets it apart from other strands of Buddhist thought such as Zen, which is far more popular in the United States.
Emptiness (शून्यता, in Sanskrit) is a particularly challenging concept since it would seem to require a powerful dissolution of self to even glimpse it. In other words, how can I, a material entity, get rid of my thoughts and fleshliness enough to tune into the emptiness of all things? This question is precisely what I found myself contemplating while teaching Reiki recently, but this time, as opposed to the entirety of my adult life up to this point, I had a realization that illuminated emptiness in a new way, renewed my interest in Tendai Buddhism, and helped deepen my knowledge of Reiki. I’d like to explain all of these things in this blog post.
1. Emptiness, Sunyata, शून्यता
In the Mahayana tradition, “sunyata” (emptiness) usually refers to the belief that all things are empty of intrinsic existence and nature. Secondarily, this emptiness is discovered in a maximally open state of awareness attainable through meditation. The word “empty” links “sunyata” to its Sanskrit roots where the word meant “void-ness” or “the state of zero.” But what precisely does all of this mean, and why is it relevant today?
While meditating, I began to understand that something lacking intrinsic nature is, instead, constituted through its relation to other things. To find emptiness does not mean to dissolve into nothingness. Rather, it means to abandon the search for a unified, internal essence of things and to look instead to the way each thing is formed by and interconnected with all other things. Emptiness is, in other words, at least at first glimpse, a radically exterior phenomenon, insofar as each thing’s ontological status (its is-ness) is dependent on its external connections.
But if interiority is an illusion, then so too is exteriority. It doesn’t make sense to embrace the opposite of one thing if the opposite is itself nullified through a deconstruction of the starting point. Toward what, then, does “emptiness” lead? It leads to a realization that all things are relational, that even the most static of objects is in fact a dynamic relational process. Without either interiority or exteriority, we are left with the relations and movements between things.
[If you are thinking, “How can object be a relational process??” then email me and we’ll discuss it!]
On a practical level, these ideas become useful while meditating. From now on, I no longer think of closing my eyes and retreating into some interior essence within myself. Likewise, I don’t look outward and hope to find myself composed by exterior forces. What I now see is a porous self that communicates constantly with everything around me. To tune into my “self” means to tune into the relations that flow through me. By dissolving a solid and singular notion of myself, I, in effect, hollow out that “I” and acknowledge that I am traversed by the energies of everything else.
In terms of Reiki, I now understand that this emptying of myself brings me to the starting point from which I am able to begin a Reiki session or a class on Reiki. Without this knowledge of the relational self, it is likely that the small self (the ego) will get in the way and cloud my thinking as I attempt to attune myself to the presence of another person or multiple students in a class.
2. Tendai, Usui, and the more “esoteric” aspects of Reiki
Many aspects of Reiki lose their mystery—in a productive way—when we historicize the life and upbringing of Usui. For example, to understand the “ki” (or Xi, Chi) component of Reiki, we can ponder the martial practice of aiki (合氣術), which, as Frans and Bronwen Stiene discuss in The Japanese Art of Reiki, Usui practiced from the time of childhood. Familiar to people in the U.S. as Aikido, this martial art redirects the power of attacking opponents and teaches how to focus one’s own internal power into decisive sword blows. Moving the ki of another person during a Reiki session works on similar principles and can be developed as a skill by training in the same way that Aikido artists train. (Other martial arts are equally relevant, such as Tai Chi, which is something I stress in my classes.)
Other aspects of Reiki, however, remain quite obscure even when we historicize them. For example, we could begin to discuss the workings of the Reiki sign system and the phenomenon of distance Reiki by researching Shugendō (修験道), a kind of shamanism that allows initiates to enhance their spiritual powers through disciplined training—though, “shamanism” isn’t a great word to use because of its largely misunderstood meanings in the U.S. Usui’s parents are believed to have practiced this art, and therefore we can assume, as do the Stienes, that Usui would have inherited that knowledge. Nonetheless, it is likely that even a lengthy conversation about Shugendō will not help new practitioners of Reiki to really understand the more esoteric dimensions of this art. At this point, we can turn back to Tendai and its primary principles.
In particular, ichinen sanzen (一念三千) speaks of the interconnectedness of all things, and this notion, in turn, spreads into the Buddhist principle of nonduality which dissolves the notion of a closed-off or autonomous “self.” Seishin Clark explains that the Japanese phrase translates to “3000 worlds in a single thought.”
[A]n entity of life actually possesses one hundred worlds. Each of these worlds in turn possesses thirty realms, which means that in the one hundred worlds there are three thousand realms. [...] if there is the slightest bit of life, it contains all the three thousand realms.
The culmination of this train of thought is that “We are not separate from that which we cannot see or conceptualise. With a single thought, we are able to penetrate the entire cosmos, just as the cosmos penetrates all phenomena.” Here, we have the gateway that leads to distance Reiki.
As with all aspects of Buddhism and Reiki, each of these ideas unfolds through a conscientious practice of meditation, mindfulness, and curiosity. It takes effort to see the gateway, more effort to walk through it, and more effort still to follow the path into the territory beyond. In a Reiki I or II class, however, it is enough to begin to sense the presence of the gateway, and I think that Tendai’s main tenets help students enhance that sense.
3. Emptiness, interconnectivity, and the actuality of enlightenment
If emptiness unfolds into a more dynamic and porous notion of self and the interconnectivity of all things reveals truths tucked within the principle of nonduality, then what is left to explore when studying Reiki? Why, of course, the answer is enlightenment.
Some students have expressed to me a feeling that they are not “healthy” enough to practice Reiki well or that they do not understand the philosophy well enough. There is some substance to worries like this since each practitioner needs their own conscientious practice of self-reflection in order to undertake Reiki. But lurking in those worries is also a misunderstanding of “perfection” and enlightenment, and this misunderstanding needs to be overcome. How? Through an important short-circuit of the typical framework that constructs notions of enlightenment in the minds of many people.
For most, enlightenment is something that one attains. To attain something, by extension, means to lack that thing in the present. Therefore, people set off to find enlightenment somewhere “outside” of themselves, in some teaching of another person or school. As I’ve discussed here, however, “outside” is no longer a realistic position if we consider that the ostensibly “interior” dimension of the self is really a network of millions of relations that weave all things together. We can’t go looking outside because there is no outside. Neither will we find anything inside ourselves, for the same reason. But the entire search for enlightenment fades away if we consider that we are always already participating in the great mystery. In other words, we already embody the seed of enlightenment. We need to remember this, to remember that we proceed from a place of enlightenment and that each meaningful interaction with another being provides an opportunity to forget the confines of the ego and tap into something much bigger and more profound.
The practice of Reiki presents the opportunity to participate with another being in this act of remembering and connecting. This is precisely the third principle of Tendai, which states that “all beings possess the infinite potential to discover the truth together.” We could quibble over the exact meaning of “possess” and “potential” and “discover.” Is not possession really a letting go? Potential another word for latent and always-already existing power? Discover a synonym for uncover or re-see something that has been here in plain sight but in a different guise? The gist of the principle, however, is extremely freeing: once you’ve turned toward the work, you’re benefiting from the fruits of that work.
It has been my experience that Reiki classes provide students with a kind of accelerated remembering. There is most certainly a deconstructive dimension of the class that requires us all to confront the acts of cultural appropriation, assumptions of whiteness, and commodification of “new age” thinking so common in energy work. This work, though, ends up guiding students into a nuanced engagement with the big ideas that I’ve discussed here, and those ideas, in turn, set the tone for a lifelong exploration of many mysteries that contemporary society rarely values.
Related Blog Posts: Written by Will: “Distance Reiki” (4 parts), “The Task of Nothing”, and “What about Everything?”