Justin Stein University of Toronto

Reiki Balances the Chakras: a Japanese Healing Practice in New Age India

Justin STEIN

A 2009 article in the Life & Style section of The Times of India, the worlds

bestselling English-language daily newspaper and most-visited newspaper website,

concludes with a call to action that seems more from the mouth of a charismatic preacher

than the pen of an ostensibly impartial journalist. Use your hands to heal yourself and

others, the author urges readers. Your touch may lead to miracles! Her subject?

Reiki, which she describes as a Japanese technique and a spiritual practice that heals

by balancing the chakras of the body. i

The audience of this article, largely upper- and upper-middle-class Indians, may

recognize a mix of the familiar and the foreign in the authors description of this

ostensibly Japanese technique in terms of chakras, the wheels along the central channel

of the subtle body in yogic anatomy. However, this is not because it resonates with

traditional Indian idea of health. Although the chakra system indeed derives from

premodern yogic models that also promote a balance of lunar and solar energies, the

concept of balancing ones chakras is not a product of ancient India but also the

twentieth-century New Age. Though once a distinctive element of Indian religion, the

chakra system was teased out of its original context by a small group of English and

American occultists and spiritual healers who then re-spun it into a common thread that

today, like belief in the energetic properties of crystals, has been woven into the very

fabric of metaphysical religion around the world. ii Thus, while references to the chakra

system should be understood within the cultural inventory of other autochthonous

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elements in the world of Indian Reiki, they must also be understood within other trends in

transnational metaphysical religion.

Among the most important of these trends is the cross-cultural hybridization at the

heart of the process called transculturation. Coined by Cuban anthropologist Fernando

Ortiz in 1940, transculturation is a valuable conceptual tool for analyzing how

intercultural interactions transform and generate cultural practices. iii In addition to the

mixture of elements from prior practices and introduced ones, Ortiz also intended the

trans- of his neologism to express both the loss of prior practices and the creation of

new ones (which he termed deculturation and neoculturation, respectively). He

believed, rightly, that these processes are unrecognized by the more prevalent term

acculturation and its assimilative connotations. iv

Reiki is an apt subject for transculturative analysis. Reiki is a group of spiritual

healing practices, first systematized in 1920s Japan by Mikao Usui (1865-1926) but

repeatedly reimagined in diverse locations by diverse actors for diverse audiences. The

vast majority of the worlds Reiki practitioners trace their lineages to Hawayo Takata

(1900-1980), a Nisei (second-generation Japanese immigrant) from the Hawaiian island

of Kauai who learned Reiki in Japan in the 1930s and spent the rest of her life teaching,

ultimately authorizing twenty-two of her students (mostly in North America in the late

1970s) to become teachers themselves. Takatas students and her students students

brought Reiki to every continent of the globe and today one can find professional Reiki

practitioners and instructors in most countries, but particularly in North America, Japan,

India, Australia, New Zealand, the U. A. E., and Israel. v

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Reikis lineage structure and general lack of organizing bodies have allowed its

practices to rapidly diversify, resulting in divergent practices. In the transculturation

process, individuals in diffuse locales have differently imagined the practice of Reiki,

transforming their teachers practices by combining them with local ones, disregarding

certain elements, emphasizing others, and innovating others still. vi These transformed

practices are then re-disseminated across geographic and cultural divides and the process

begins anew. vii Indian claims that Reiki balances the chakras are but one hybridized

blossoming of a vast, variegated, and decentered rhizomatic network that spans the globe.

It is estimated that, in the approximately twenty years since its introduction to

India, over one million Indians have paid to undergo the initiation called Reiki

attunement, empowering them to channel a universal energy in order to heal pain and

disease. viii It is tempting to identify this as simply another example of a global trend to

seek out alternatives to Western biomedicine, as Rohit Pithauria does in a recent feature

on alternative therapies in India Today, where he presents Reiki alongside acupressure,

acupuncture, and aromatherapy. However, in sharp contrast to the accounts of

acupressure and aromatherapys restorative benefits that Pithauria cites from practitioners

of those arts, the description of Reiki he provides from practitioner and teacher Jaishree

Iyer is that of a distinctly spiritual discipline passed from master to disciple, only

mastered by an individual building up enough life force energy through meditation and

practice. ix

But, given both the abundance of indigenous Indian spiritual healing practices and

the cultural gap between India and the cultural products of East Asia lamented by Arjun

Appadurai in a recent paper, x why have so many Indians turned to these techniques of

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Japanese origin to find healing? This essay addresses this question, describing some of

the historical processes involved in Reiki becoming a prominent form of healing in India

and proposing some reasons for its popularity there. xi

The demography of Indian Reiki practitioners is largely composed of upper- and

upper-middle-class Indian urbanites and thus resembles that of Indian devotees to Sathya

Sai Baba. xii Indeed, spiritual devotion to such gurus can serve a mediatory role,

predisposing devotees in India and elsewhere to accept both the healing miracles claimed

by believers in Reiki and the master-disciple relationship concretized in Reikis system of

initiation-based lineage. Yet, while lineage structures stresses continuity with an

imagined original, authentic revelation, the spiritual landscape of contemporary India also

replicates ruptures from the nations social history; it is a palimpsest that bears traces of

colonial authors even as it is reinscribed by the consumerism that has followed Indias

liberalization. As argued convincingly by Peter van der Veer, the intrinsically Indian

spirituality defined by Hindu reformers and anti-colonialists such as Ram Mohan Roy,

Swami Vivekananda, and Mohandas Gandhi, was constructed in dialectic opposition to

Western materiality in an essentializing discourse of exceptionality. Though this

narrative was used in resistance to European imperialism, it also represents an

internalization of the Orientalist discourse that contrasts modern European material

superiority with ancient Asian spiritual sophistication. xiii

Yet Reikia spiritual healing practice of Japanese provenance brought to India

by enthusiastic Westerners who describe its power with scientific vocabulary including

energy, vibrations, and quantaseems, on some level, to both transcend and

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include this binary discourse of East and West. xiv The Indian Reiki practitioner engages

in a practice with connections to multiple nodes in a transnational network of cultural

signifiers: a truly global practice that includes foreign elements of both Western and non-

Western origins. xv Some of the ways in which the binaries of East/West, spirit/reason,

antiquity/modernity, as well as the syntheses of these polar opposites, helped to mediate

Reikis introduction to India and facilitate its popularity there are concretized in the

woman who introduced it to the subcontinent.

Reiki seems to have first been brought to India in 1989 by an American

psychologist whose hybrid identity is seen in the multiple monikers she marshals. xvi As

Dr. Paula Horan, she cites her Ph.D. in psychology to establish her credibility, a typical

move in the world of spirituality, which has a complex relationship with the world of

institutions. xvii In fact, one of the chief factors in Reikis success worldwide is its

licensure of metaphysical healers through the certification of initiation. Furthermore, the

history of Reiki is rife with non-medical doctors who use the title Doctor to connote

authority and suggest medical expertise. xviii However by also going under Laxmi, the

spiritual name given her by her Indian guru, Sri H.W.L. Poonja (also known as Papaji),

Horan cites the credentials of the indigenous guru-disciple relationship mirrored in

Reikis initiation-lineage model. Based on initial fieldwork, I have found that Indian

practitioners are more likely to describe their Reiki Masters in devout language than non-

Indians, often saying that it was the grace of God that drew them together.

Yet, while in some sense this Laxmi, Ph.D. who both teaches Indians to

manifest abundance through intention and leads Jana Yoga retreats in Europeis a

distinctly American incarnation of the Hindu goddess of prosperity, she is no first-

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generation hybrid of East and West. Several iterations of dialectic interaction between

Indian and Euro-American spiritualities have transformed such black and white

distinctions into brilliantly nuanced shades of gray. In her introduction to the article

Energy Dynamics, Horan describes how invisible energy blocks are literally

sketched into the physical matrix on a cellular level, preventing individuals from

reaching full potential and growing in coherence; she then explains that in India,

Tantric practitioners have long known the secret of manipulating these energy blocks

which can result from lifetimes of attachment. xix The ease with which Horan moves

back and forth between the ultra-modern vocabulary of North American psychodynamics

and that of ancient South Asian religious practice is the legacy of generations of

Theosophists, Hindu reformers, and others who have blended the black and white of

East/West, spirit/science into masterworks of monochrome, stunning grisaille portraiture.

To provide another, more polychromatic example, consider the widespread

correlation between the seven chakras and the seven colors of the light spectrum. While

ten yogis will typically provide ten clashing schemata for the chakras colors, Reiki

practitioners consistently describe them in an orderly rainbow, ascending from red at the

perineums root chakra to violet at the fontanels crown chakra. The New Age

consensus on this matter is reified in the words of the India-born, Dubai-based Reiki

master Mohan Makkar, who writes: The most important thing to remember is the colour

of each chakra. Mix the wrong colour and it will bring a major disaster in your life. xx

Makkar, who holds a Ph.D. in A. M. (likely alternative medicines), has no doubt that

the chakras colors are as described by twentieth century Euro-American mystics, even if

he is unaware of this descriptions non-Indian provenance.

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Aligning Reiki with this decontextualized rainbow-colored chakra system is by no

means specific to the Indian Reiki community, xxi but this connection takes on very

different meanings within and without the subcontinent. In the global network of New

Age practitioners, the specifically Indian identity of the chakra system was obscured by

the Theosophists that popularized it and, like Reiki itself, chakras today can broadly

encode Eastern wisdom. Even a leading German Reiki author who lived and worked

for years at the Indian ashram of the guru known as Osho describes the chakras as force

centers known to most Eastern philosophies. xxii

While non-Indian references to the chakras can be such vague appeals to the

authority of exotic Asian tradition, for Indian practitioners, the claim that Reiki affects

the chakras combines the foreign with the familiar, the hybrid quality characteristic of

transculturative practices. It makes no difference that the chakra system being utilized is

the twentieth century rainbow system rather than that described by scriptures or yogis;

Indians have internalized Theosophists visions of India as much as Euro-Americans

have. In the words of Ortiz, the result of every union of cultures is similar to that of the

reproductive process between individuals: the offspring always has something of both

parents but is always different from each of them. xxiii As such, even the ostensibly

Indian elements of Indianized Reiki are themselves the progeny of earlier iterations of

transculturation.

Another hybrid reimagining of Hindu tradition underlies the account of an India-

born psychology professor recalling her first encounter with Reiki at a New Age

conference in Boulder, Colorado. Sangeeta Singg, who teaches at Angelo State

University in west-central Texas, describes the scene in a chapter on Reiki in an edited

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volume providing peer-reviewed research supporting various complementary therapies.

She writes:

I assumed that Reiki was similar to some healing practices that have been in

existence for centuries in India. If you have ever seen the pictures of Hindu gods

and goddesses, you would notice that they have their right hands facing you with

energy bursting out of them. This energy represents the divine energy that heals

and blesses. Also in India, when younger people touch the feet of elders as a form

of greeting, the elders place their palms on the younger persons heads and

shoulders giving them ashirwad, which means blessings. xxiv

This passage is compelling, not because an Indian psychologist living abroad relates an

unfamiliar spiritual healing practice to those of her homeland, but because this hands-on

healing practice of Japanese origin causes her to reinterpret familiar icons and customs.

The rays of light emitted by Hindu deities become healing energy; ritualized bodily

contact becomes a reciprocal healing practice.

In a sense, Dr. Singg and Dr. Horan are mirror images, both liminal figures, but

on opposite sides of the looking glass. Horan traveled from the U. S. to India to study

with a guru, but she now resides there full-time, teaching seminars in which she applies

Hindu language to her native practices of Reiki and psychodynamics. Singg came

from India to the U.S. to study psychology, where she is now an academic and health

professional who has reconceived the cultural practices of her homeland in terms of Reiki.

These examples demonstrate a bilateral aspect of the transculturation process:

intercultural exchanges produce not only the assimilation of the foreign but also the

reimagining of the familiar.

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Other examples of Reikis Indianization include the chanting of OM at the end

of Reiki classes, the teaching to focus on particular chakras during Reiki treatments, as

well as explications of Reiki in the Sanskrit terms of Tantra yoga and of Reikis

reinforcement of the lessons of the Bhagavad Gita. xxv The stories Indians tell of Reikis

origins. While instructors from around the world teach that Usui, Reikis Japanese

founder, rediscovered the practice of Reiki in Buddhist scriptures written in ancient India,

it is fairly common for Indian authors to claim that Usui actually traveled to India to learn

Sanskrit and study sutras. xxvi Ascribing Reikis source to India and Siddhartha Gautama

engages contemporary Indian practitioners in the homecoming of an authentically Indian

lineage, like the Indian followers of Western disciples of Indian yogis. xxvii Uncritical

reception of these narratives allows practitioners from around the world to reimagine

Indian religious history in terms of a contemporary healing practice.

Yet using markers of Indian religiosity is only one way that practitioners and

instructors make Reiki appealing to Indian audiences. Perhaps equally important are

emblems of Reikis foreignness, its exotic, even Oriental nature that gives it a different

sort of authority than that of indigenous healing methods. The exoticization of Japanese

culture, language, and people in India may have been mediated by American or British

influence, but it is certainly present in how Indians perceive Reiki and its origins. Like

similar websites produced in America, Europe, and Australia, Indian websites tend to

linger on the multiple meanings and orthographies of the traditional kanji (Chinese

characters) for rei and ki, a pastime wholly absent from their Japanese equivalents, which

typically do not even employ the kanji. xxviii As kanji make up two of the four sacred

symbols shared by all Reiki lineages and taught to upper level students, the fetishization

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of Japanese script, exhibited on the tattooed shoulders and biceps of the global generation,

is undeniably part of Reikis transnational appeal.

Indian exoticization of Reikis origins is explicit in the opening passage of a

webpage called Reiki History hosted on iloveindia.com, a lifestyle site with extensive

information about Reikis multifarious teachings and practices. It reads:

Not much has been known about the actual origin and history of Reiki, it is

believed that the healing art found its origin in the orient, centuries ago. People

studied energies and developed a method of sounds and symbols. If truth be told,

many healing processes have emerged from this root system and the original

source itself go elapsed regrettably. In the mid 19th century, the ancient system

was rediscovered by Dr. Mikao Usui, who was a Japanese Christian professor in

Kyoto (Japan). xxix

Along with some misinformation, xxx this brief excerpt provides rich fodder for textual

analysis. To begin, the narrative of reviving a forgotten, original root system from

Asias distant past resonates with two themes. The first, and more general, is the idea,

sometimes called lapsarian, that human cultures have degenerated from an original,

unified, enlightened age into the current, fragmented, ignorant world marked by disease

and strife. A common conclusion of the lapsarian narrative is that present-day

individuals must work to restore humanitys natural state of good health and peace. This

theme is used extensively in New Age culture, but can also be seen in any number of

established religious traditions that teach of a primordial golden age.

The second, and more historically specific, theme is the idea that Reiki is a revival

of an ancient, ahistorical Oriental wisdom. The uncomfortably anachronistic description

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of Reikis origin in the orient, centuries ago is a clear example of Indian internalization

of European narratives of Asian exceptionalism. Following a discourse established by

Vivekananda and Gandhi, this anonymous Indian author implicitly agrees with

generations of Orientalists that the ancient, inscrutable East is, in contrast to the West,

characterized by ancient spiritual wisdom rather than modern material technology. This

bifurcation of East and West, past and present, spirit and science, sets up the possibility

for their synthesis by present day figures who are able to bridge the two worlds. Usui is

one of these figures as he

did an extensive study for 21 yrs to know about the healing phenomena of ancient

sages. He also studied the earliest sutras . . . [and] the ancient sounds & symbols

that stimulate the life force energy for healing, and are directly connected with

human body and nervous system. He then went through a metaphysical

occurrence and got empowered to use these sounds & symbols for healing. Till

his death in late 19th century, he taught the healing art all over Japan and named it

Reiki. . . . a powerful spiritual art of healing which has also received scientific

validation. xxxi

The exoticism and appeal to religious and scientific authority inherent in this text

is largely the work of Hawayo Takata, the Nisei who told Dr. Usuis story to North

American audiences in the 1960s and 1970s. Judging by Reikis incredible success in

India, this story works for Indian audiences today as it did for Takatas students four

decades earlier. Like Drs. Horan and Singg, Usuia Japanese Christian who develops a

present-day healing system out of ancient Buddhist textsis a hybrid figure who

negotiates East and West, tradition and modernity, faith and science, spirit and reason.

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Central to Reikis transnational success is its audiences desire to similarly reconcile

perceived conflicts between the modern, rational, scientific West and the ancient,

intuitive, spiritual East. Usui is the idealized builder of a bridge spanning these worlds,

and practitioners are able to follow his path with the guidance of their instructors (called

Reiki Masters), who substitute for the original, absent master. Thus, no matter where

on the globe, Reiki Masters and their disciples are able to draw on elements of both

worlds through their engagement with Reiki.

This preliminary study is only a prelude to a more sustained work on this subject.

In this brief paper, I have simply tried to demonstrate that Reiki appeals to Indian

audiences and develop some initial analysis of this phenomenon. However, in order to

more thoroughly understand the attraction of Reiki for these audiences, there are several

avenues that must be pursued. First of all, future fieldwork must address the significance

of commercial aspects of Reiki, a convenient, if not always cheap, art to learn, and a

potentially lucrative one to teach. Second, the study would benefit from some sense of

the context of recent Indo-Japanese relations, both in terms of socioeconomics and

cultural imaginaries. Arjun Appadurai, in the paper cited in this articles introduction,

refers to the role of East Asian settings as exotic locations in Tamil film and we have

already seen an Indian website that refers to Reikis origin in the ancient orient. xxxii

Given Indias contemporary position as a major producer of and market for technological

goods and services as well as popular cultural media, how have sociocultural relations

between Indians and Japanese on material and symbolic levels affected the reception of

Reiki in the subcontinent? Finally, based on my social interactions with members of

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Torontos sizable South Asian diaspora, as well as my citations of Mohan Makkar, the

Indian Reiki Master based in Dubai, it seems that any study of Reiki in India would also

have to take into account the bilateral interactions between Indians living within and

without Indias geographical boundaries.

In conclusion, while some of the conclusions of this paper are broadly applicable

to the transculturation of Reiki and other Asian spiritual practices worldwide, there

remains more work to be done to determine why Reiki has been so successful in India.

This preliminary study on Reikis success in India has tried to capture some site-specific

elements of Reikis appeal to upper- and upper-middle-class Indian urbanites, including

the mediatory role of Westerners in this intra-Asian cultural flow as well as distinctly

Indian combinations of the allure of the exotic and the authority of the local.

i
Rakshita Pandey, Reiki: Healing with a Miracle Touch, The Times of India, March 5,
2009, timesofindia.indiatimes.com/life-style/health-fitness/health/Reiki-Healing-with-a-
miracle-touch/articleshow/3156867.cms.
ii
The 1927 book The Chakras by British Theosophist Charles Leadbeater wasnt the first
English-language volume on the subject, but in the words of Catherine Albanese, it
signaled the cultural detatchment and reattatchment that transformed the language of
chakras into a Hermetic and metaphysical lingua franca. A Republic of Mind and Spirit:
A Cultural History of American Metaphysical History (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 2007), 453. Albanese goes on to analyze Leadbeaters claims that mystics from
both East and West were familiar with the force-centres of the chakras and argues that
he went further than earlier Theosophical writers such as Blavatsky in showing more
clearly how portable and culturally detatchable the South Asian teachings actually were.
Republic, 455. It is unclear when the now ubiquitous phrase balance the chakras began
to be used, but it was heavily popularized by three American metaphysical healers
described by Albanese, each of whom published a best-selling book on chakras in 1987:
Anodea Judith, Rosalyn Bruyere, and Barbara Brennan. Republic, 455-461.
iii
Translated into English as Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar in 1947, Ortizs
best-known book, Contrapunteo Cubano del Tabaco y el Azcar, has since been
republished several times.

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iv
Fernando Ortiz, Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar (Durham: Duke University
Press, 1995), 102-103.
v
The combined listings of two online directories (www.bodymindspiritdirectory.org/ and
www.internationalholistictherapiesdirectories.com/index.htm), accessed September 29,
2011, provide contact information for Reiki practitioners and instructors in over one
hundred countries and territories. One notable absence is China, perhaps unsurprising
given its treatment of Falun Gong practitioners. Furthermore, Reiki has been taught on
literally every continent: in December 1999, William Lee Rand taught a Reiki class at the
South Pole, where he also embedded a crystal grid designed to [promote] world peace
by becoming a planetary beacon charged with healing energies sent by people from all
over the world; he had placed an identical crystal grid at the North Pole two years earlier.
World Peace Crystal Grid Placed at the South Pole, Reiki News, accessed September 27,
2011, www.reiki.org/globalhealing/southp.html.
vi
This propensity is particularly evident when one examines the practice common to all
Reiki lineages of recounting the life of the founder Usui. The authors of Usuis memorial
stone make use of Confucian rhetoric to compare him to the excellent and wise scholars
of the past and describe his spiritual method as rectifying ones heart-mind by means
of ones intrinsic spiritual powers (original translation). Various schools of Reiki claim
that Usui was an initiate of either Shingon or Tendai Buddhism, the two major forms of
Japanese esoteric Buddhism (mikky). See Lama Yeshe, Medicine Dharma Reiki: An
Introduction to the Secret Inner Practices with Extensive Excerpts from Dr. Usuis
Journals (Delhi: Full Moon Publishing, 2001) and Dave King, O-Sensei: A View of
Mikao Usui (Lulu.com, 2006). For a North American and a South American Christian
interpretation of Reiki, see Bonnie Gray-Levesque, A Judeo-Christian Look at Reiki: One
Womans Opinion (Parker, CO: Outskirts Press, 2009) and Maria Celeste Manzione,
MariEL Reiki English Manual, last modified November 6, 2007, www.manzione-
reiki.com/2007/11/marielreiki-english-manual.html. For speculations that Reiki was
brought to Earth, possibly to a lost continent, by extraterrestrials, see Barbara Weber Ray,
The Reiki Factor: A Guide to Natural Healing, Helping, and Wholeness (Smithtown, NY:
Exposition Press, 1983), 45 and Diane Stein, Essential Reiki: A Complete Guide to an
Ancient Healing Art (Freedom, CA: The Crossing Press, 1995), 8-9. Ray, among others,
also discusses Reikis use in ancient Egypt and Tibet. Recent attempts to recreate the
traditional and authentic original practices of Usui have emphasized his innovative
spiritual practices, including the chanting of the poetry of the Meiji Emperor. Frank
Arjava Petter and Mikao Usui, The Original Reiki Handbook of Dr. Mikao Usui (Twin
Lakes, WI: Lotus Light Press, 1999) and King, O-Sensei.
vii
In addition to the language of transculturation, I have also found helpful Manuel
Vsquez and Marie Friedmann Marquardts discussion of this process in terms of the
dialectic of deterritorialization and reterritorialization. Globalizing the Sacred: Religion
across the Americas (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2003), 51-54.

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viii
William Lee Rand, Reiki in India, accessed June 14, 2011,
www.reiki.org/reikinews/india.html. This is roughly half of the estimated two million
Reiki practitioners worldwide and, even if this estimate is ultimately inaccurate, its
magnitude points to the fact that Reiki has been incredibly popular in India. A 2004
article about Reikis resurgence refers to how it spread like forest fire in the mid-1990s.
Suma Varughese, Reiki Rediscovering Reiki, Life Positive, May 2004,
www.lifepositive.com/Body/Reiki/Rediscovering_Reiki52004.asp.
ix
Rohit Pithauria, Alternate Gains, India Today, February 23, 2010,
indiatoday.intoday.in/site/Story/85336/Alternate+gains.html?page=0.
x
This comment was part of a larger discussion of the discursive space of Asia in which
Appadurai asked whether the people of India and Japan see a shared Asian heritage.
He concluded that while there are examples of intra-Asian relationalities in popular
cultural media (such as the use of exotic and modern East Asian settings in Tamil
cinema), these cultural spheres are much more conscious of their relationality to the West
than to one another. Arjun Appadurai, The New and the Now: Globalization and the
Politics of Dj Vu (paper presented at the Asian Institute, Munk School of Global
Affairs, Toronto, October 22, 2010).
xi
Throughout this paper, when I refer to the subcontinent, India, and Indians, I am
not describing an undifferentiated mass of land and people, but a distinct territory and
demographic: an archipelago of urban enclaves disproportionately peopled by the upper-
and upper-middle-classes, as well as particular outposts in prominent non-urban spiritual
locales such as ashrams and pilgrimage sites.
xii
Hugh Urban, Avatar for Our Age: Sathya Sai Baba and the Cultural Contradictions of
Late Capitalism, Religion, 33 (2003): 73-93.
xiii
For more on this interactional model of the construction of mutually opposed national
identities, see the works of Peter van der Veer, particularly Imperial Encounters: Religion
and Modernity in India and Britain (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001);
Introduction (with Christophe Jaffrelot), in Patterns of Middle Class Consumption in
India and China, eds. Christophe Jaffrelot and Peter van der Veer (Los Angeles: Sage,
2008), 11-34; and Global Breathing: Religious Utopias in India and China, in
Transnational Transcendence: Essays on Religion and Globalization, ed. Thomas C.
Csordas (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 263-278.
xiv
The idea that forms both transcend and include prior ones comes from Ken Wilbers
integral theory. A Brief History of Everything (Boulder: Shambhala, 1996).
xv
For a compelling account of how the circulation of Japanese popular cultural media has
been able to provide a similar non-Western alternative modernity in East Asia, see
Koichi Iwabuchi, Recentering Globalization: Popular Culture and Japanese
Transnationalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003).

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xvi
According to a recent blog interview with Horan, Indias first Reiki class was held in
Mumbai in 1989. Lalit Puri, Paula Horan Brought Reiki to India, February 24, 2011,
www.speakingtree.in/public/bykxr8y2yhvpnvg441095wlil/blog/Paula-Horan-brought-
Reiki-to-India.
xvii
For a recent text on American spiritualities that provides extensive reflection on this
complex relationship, see Courtney Bender, The New Metaphysicals: Spirituality and the
American Religious Imagination (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 37-38.
xviii
The most prevalent usage of the title Doctor in the Reiki world is in stories of Usui,
Reikis founder, who is often referred to as Dr. Usui, despite not having been either a
medical doctor or recipient of a doctorate. Another crucial figure in global Reiki history
is Dr. Barbara Weber Ray; the dust jacket of her most famous book cites Rays Ph.D. in
the humanities, her membership in Phi Beta Kappa and Mensa, and her Fulbright
scholarship to bolster the claim that Dr. Ray is the most qualified authority on Reiki.
The Reiki Factor: A Guide to Natural Healing, Helping, and Wholeness. Smithtown,
NY: Exposition Press, 1983. This practice is prevalent in India as well. Dr. P. S. Lalitha
of Chennai, a former professor of veterinary medicine, has prominently on her home page
CONSULTANT IN LEADING HOSPITALS, which some might think implies that she
is a medical doctor. Holistic Healing, accessed September 27, 2011,
www.pslalitha.com. And the husband-wife team who are the founding directors of the
Reiki Healing Foundation in New Delhi are described on their website as: Dr. N. K.
Sharma & Dr. Savita Sharma are undoubtedly, the real & the perfect Gurus whose
courses on the Laws of Nature are scientific & myth-breaking. World Renown
Naturopath & Reiki Grandmasters, accessed September 27, 2011, Reiki Healing
Foundation, www.reikihealingfoundation.net/worldrenown.asp. By no means is this sort
of appeal to credentials unique to Reiki; consider how Mehmet Oz, host of Dr. Oz, one
of the top syndicated television programs in the U.S., gains authority by wearing medical
scrubs on air.
xix
Paula Horan, Energy Dynamics: Clearing Desires and Resistances to Reach Our Full
Potential, accessed September 27, 2011, www.paulahoran.com/writing.html.
xx
Mohan Makkar, Mohan Makkars Reiki Magic (the Usui System) & Creative
Visualization Exercises: the Symbols and Attunement Techniques Revealed Step by Step
(Completely Illustrated) (New Delhi: UBS Publishers Distributors, 1999), 51.
xxi
A February 2011 Google Images search for Reiki yielded rainbow-colored chakra
diagrams in two of the top five results, and two of the other images also had rainbows,
including a rainbow colored OM symbol (a Sanskrit syllable). All five of the websites
that hosted these images were based in the U. S.
xxii
Frank Arjava Petter, Reiki Fire: New Information about the Origins of the Reiki
Power: a Complete Manual (Twin Lakes, WI: Lotus Press, 1997), 100.

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Justin Stein University of Toronto

xxiii
Ortiz, Counterpoint, 103.
xxiv
Sangeeta Singg, Reiki: An Alternative and Complementary Healing Therapy, in
Complementary Therapies in Rehabilitation: Evidence for Efficacy in Therapy, ed. Carol
M. Davis (Thorofare, NJ: SLACK, Inc., 2008), 261-278.
xxv
The first two examples come from Makkar, Reiki Magic, 50-51, 148. The latter two
come from two articles from the English-language Indian body-mind-spirit magazine
Life Positive. Shamal Durve, Reiki why Reiki works, Life Positive, March 2007,
www.lifepositive.com/Spirit/Tantra/Why_Reiki_Works32007.asp. Meenakshi Suri,
Reiki Light Made Manifest, Life Positive, June 2005,
www.lifepositive.com/Body/Reiki/Light_Made_Manifest62005.asp
xxvi
Makkar, Reiki Magic, 36. Sukhdeepak Malvai, Reiki: A Unique Art of Healing
(Delhi: Gyan Books, 1998), 26.
xxvii
Kathinka Frystad, The return path: anthropology of a Western yogi, in
Transnational Transcendence: Essays on Religion and Globalization, ed. Thomas C.
Csordas (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 279-304.
xxviii
For instance, see the main page on Reiki on Life Positives website, which not only
provides thirteen meanings for the character rei, but also provides five different ways to
write reiki in different styles of Japanese orthography. Notably, Reiki in Japan is
typically written in katakana, the syllabary primarily used for words of foreign origin.
Reiki Introduction, Life Positive, accessed June 14, 2011,
www.lifepositive.com/body/energy-healing/reiki/reiki.asp.
xxix
Reiki History, accessed June 14, 2011, www.iloveindia.com/reiki/reiki-history.html.
xxx
As mentioned earlier, Usui, who was never a doctor or a professor, first systematized
Reiki in the 1920s. There is also no evidence that he was a Christian. All of these
apocrypha (except the inexplicable idea that Usui, born in 1865, rediscovered Reiki in
the mid-nineteenth century) can be traced to the hagiographic account of Reiki history
told by Hawayo Takata, the woman who brought Reiki out of Japan in the late 1930s.
xxxi
Reiki History, accessed June 14, 2011, www.iloveindia.com/reiki/reiki-history.html.
xxxii
Appadurai, The New and the Now.

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