Reiki as Ecotheological Praxis

“REIKI AS ECOTHEOLOGICAL PRAXIS”

TH522: Ecotheology and the Spirit

Colby Gaudet 26 August 2016

Myōe—Japanese Shingon monk of the late 12th century—penned a “Letter to the Island” on which he lived. In this letter he asserts: It is certainly true that the physical substance of a country is but one of the ten bodies of the Buddha... To speak of the teaching of nondifferentiation... is to say that your physical form as an island consists of the land of this nation, which is one part of the body of the Buddha.1 For this monk, that the island and all its natural elements are integral parts within the great dharmakāya—the dharma-body of the Blessed One, often known as Mahāvairocana—is an integral thread of Buddhist wisdom. This inclusivity of all beings—human, animal, vegetal, mineral, etc.—within the divine body of the Illustrious One brings—certainly, still promises—a great communion of all things very necessary for our present time of ecological destruction and cultural strife. The purpose of this writing will be to highlight traditional elements of Buddhist philosophy that have informed the contemporary practice of Reiki. I will offer perspectives from various Buddhist—and some Christian—sources to support my suggestion that Reiki may be considered a contemporary example of an ecotheological praxis—one grown out of early 20th-century Japan which has since proliferated worldwide as a universal and compassionate wellness practice. Reiki—as theory and practice—will not be the focus of these pages. Rather, I will apply a hermeneutical approach to early Buddhist texts to locate a reading that colludes with my assertion that Buddhism admonishes supreme compassionate relationality with the sentience of all beings—and in particular I will posit an emphasis on the ontology of the vegetal and how intimately this interconnectedness weaves through and sustains our lives. I will highlight how the Buddhist precepts of nonself—anātman—and emptiness—sūnyatā—characterize the bodhisattva path as the rendering of a life of contemplative service. It is this path of boundless compassion that Reiki—as an inheritor of this ethos—embodies. This evolved Buddhist spiritual sensibility was an amalgamation of influences from Tendai Mikkyō, Shungendō, and Shinto which informed Mikao Usui, the originator of the energy healing system known as Reiki—himself a Tendai Buddhist lay priest2—as it developed in 1920s Kyoto and Tokyo. As such I will provide evidence of the wide biophilic scope of the Mahāyāna tradition of Buddhism, from which the Japanese Tendai evolved via the Tiantai school of China. As a result of its historical migration across China and Japan, esoteric Mikkyō

Buddhism—flavoured also by the Indigenous Shinto of Japan, and even the Vajrayāna of Tibet—has ultimately informed the tens of thousands of 21st-century Reiki practitioners and teachers across the globe—all with a nuanced, encompassing, and propitious ecotheological potential. The ethos of Reiki was articulated by Usui in the Gokai—or Five Precepts—which advocate universal nonviolence, compassion, kindness, gratitude, and honesty.3 Reiki is thoroughly informed by an understanding of Oneness among all sentient beings of all tenses—past, present, future—and in all spatial dimensions. Reiki is unequivocal, creative, and all-knowing—it is the wisdom of the ubiquitous life force known throughout East Asian medicine and religion—ki, or qi. Patricia Adams Farmer— in “The Numinosity of Rocks”—confides, “Whitehead, Buddhism, and quantum physics are agreed (using their own language) that rocks are, in their essence, aggregates of vibrant energy rather than inert lumps of matter.”4 Before proceeding, I would like to also offer a caution against essentializing Buddhism as an inherently Nature-loving tradition. This runs the risk of projecting our own contemporary, ecologically-focused perspectives onto a tradition that was produced in a different time with a more ambiguous attitude to the natural world, that also varied from region to region, into which Buddhism traveled and migrated. We need only look to the life of Siddartha Gautama himself to see that dualized attitudes about Nature and civilization pervaded the cultural climate. The caste system the prince Siddartha was born into depended upon the exploits of industry through mercantilism and agriculture to domesticate animals, produce crops, generate economic value, and secure the hierarchy of his royal status. The image of the enlightened Śākyamuni Buddha seated tranquilly beneath the bodhi tree forms a fundamental and facile image of an organicized Buddhism. William LaFleur offers a warning against overt tree-worship, “… taking it [the bodhi tree] to be the persistence in Buddhism of some kind of primitive tree cult, some unseemly vestige of animism.”5 Nonetheless, the tree’s eternal narrative presence calls to mind the question—what role does the tree play in the Buddha’s enlightenment? Lastly before proceeding, it is important to note, while I will be discussing its genealogy from Buddhist philosophy, Reiki itself is a non-religious yet contemplative and facilitative practice which can be aligned with most religious and/or spiritual systems— including Buddhism and Christianity, as well as Humanism and atheism. The non-

denominational quality and multivalent inclusivity of Reiki affords it as praxis a universal potential to be informational for ecotheological concerns. Stephanie Kaza and Kenneth Kraft—in Dharma Rain: Sources of Buddhist Environmentalism—provide a number of early Buddhist texts from which may been read an ecotheological hermeneutics characterized by express empathy for not only other humans and the Earth as a whole, but also empathy for animals and plants, the environment and weather. These early Buddhist sources—from Theravāda and Mahāyāna schools—reveal a delicate and fluid respect, understanding, and valuation of the natural world. The Cullavagga, an early regulatory Pali text, outlines protocols for monastic life for nuns and monks of the Theravāda tradition. In it the Buddha responds to a community of priests at the death of one of their fellow priests by a lethal snake bite. The Blessed One assures the priests that the deceased surely musn't have extended his “friendliness” to the royal houses of the snakes, and thereby incurred their vengeance. Buddha instructs the priests to sing in their defense and assuage their relations with the realm of the snakes —and all of Nature: “Creatures without feet have my love, / And likewise those that have two feet, / And those that have four feet I love, / And those, too, that have many feet.”6 Likewise from the Pali canon, comes the Mettā Sutta, invoking loving-kindness (mettā), and instructing “those who are skilled in goodness” to be “peaceful and calm, wise and skillful.”6 Here, subjectivity is extended outward beyond the human, to include the entire scope of life: “May all beings be at ease. / Whatever living beings there may be, / Whether they are weak or strong, omitting none, / The great or the mighty, medium, short or small, / The seen and the unseen, / Those living near and far away, / Those born and to-be-born.”8 We can find within the Mahāyāna tradition also a deep ecotheological reverence for Nature, described as being composed of myriad sentient incarnations. The Hua-Yen Sūtra—420 CE—is the primary sacred text of the Mahāyāna path and as such informed much of the Buddhist tradition as it evolved and proliferated in China to hold the widest and most encompassing view of sentient being. It speaks to 'noble-minded people' of the omnipresent sentience of the living: “there are infinite kinds of sentient beings; some are born of eggs; some are born of the womb... Some live by earth, some by water, fire, wind, space, trees, or flowers...”9 Furthermore, the Hua-Yen Sūtra, declares the spiritual

mandate: “To all these infinite kinds of beings, I will render my service, and accommodate them in whatever way is beneficial to them.”10 The Lotus Sūtra—revered by the Tiantai sect—likens this universal Law—dharma—to the rain falling ubiquitously over all of creation, lending itself to growth, proliferation, and well-being. It reveals: “I preach the sweet dew of the pure Law. / This Law is of a single flavor, / that of emancipation, nirvana... I look upon all things / as being universally equal... and without limitation or hindrance... I bring fullness and satisfaction to the world, / like a rain that spreads its moisture everywhere.”11 Of trees specifically, Buddhaghosa—in the 5th century—recounts a tale by which a tree-spirit is brought into the community of the Blessed One. A monk of the assembly, while attempting to chop down a tree from which to make his dwelling, is confronted with the spirit of the tree who pleads with him not to remove her home: "Thereupon a certain spirit who had been reborn in that tree... appears before the monk... and begged him not to cut down the tree, saying, “Master, do not cut down my home.”12 The Buddha offers the spirit a new home in a recently vacated tree of the inner grove and she takes up a new dwelling among the monks. Meanwhile, Buddhaghosa revounts, “The Teacher took this occasion to lay down and enjoin upon the monks observance of the precept regarding the injuring of plants and trees.”13 In “The Bodhisattva Path” Śāntideva speaks of the call of the bodhisattva to provide—in a very Christ-like manner—their own body and being as nourishing sustenance from the pangs of hunger and suffering: “during the eon of famine / May I myself change into food and drink. / May I become an inexhaustible treasure / For those who are poor and destitute. / May I turn into all things they could need, / ... / Without any sense of loss or attachment, / I shall give up my body and enjoyments / .... / For the sake of benefitting all.”14 Japan, prior to receiving a spiritual migration of Buddhism from China, was (and remains) home to the Indigenous religion of Shinto. Deeply animist in its perspective, Shinto and local folklore are characterized by reverence for local deities known as kami who are understood to embody spiritual dimensions of the natural world. Moved by this reverence for the kami, Shinto holds the world’s fundamental modes of being—human, animal, vegetal, mineral, etc.—as interwoven and dependent upon each other. Graham Parkes says:

In Shintō the whole world is understood to be inhabited by shin (kami), or divine spirits. These are spirits not only of the ancestors but also of any phenomena that occasion awe or reverence: wind, thunder, lightning, rain, the sun, mountains, rivers, trees, and rocks.15 This Oneness of and with Nature is referred to by Gary Snyder as shamanic and folkbased, meaning an often Indigenous worldview which often inclusive of shape-shifting. Moving beyond the anthropocentric nexus, shape-shifting facilitates the amorphic spatiotemporality of being in the world. For Snyder, metamorphosis is beyond simply humans transforming in lycanthropic or insectoid manner—rather this power of shape-shifting is also the power of evolution and geologic time. In “Blue Mountains Constantly Walking” he expresses the movement of the mountains through time—once tall ragged peaks, worn and restructured through erosion. Landscapes blend together and melt producing rich spiritual symbology. Snyder remarks, “This projection of complex teaching diagrams onto the landscape comes from the Japanese variety of Vajrayāna Buddhism, the Shingon sect, in its interaction with the shamanistic tradition of the mountain brotherhood.”16 This “mountain brotherhood” is the esoteric Mikkyō and ascetic Shugendō sects referred to by Bronwen and Frans Stiene as influential upon the uniquely Japanese Buddhist legacy that would bring about the development of Reiki. By retreating from the distractions culture, these mountain mystics could begin a life of anātman and sūnyatā. The Stienes—in The Japanese Art of Reiki—recount: “These people were able to draw on the power of the kami and became religious figures who performed magico-religious activites.”17 This ascetic mountain-top revelation was likewise experienced by Mikao Usui during a pilgrimage and fasting ritual atop Mount Kurama in 1922. The Stienes attest: “Usui is believed to have practiced as a shugenja as well as a Tendai Buddhist, completing mountain practices on at least two Japanese mountains.”18 The mythos of the interstitial fabric of Nature is found through the Buddhist and Hindu traditions. Paul Ingram—in “The Jeweled Net of Nature”—exegetes the early Vedic myth of Indra’s web through the lens of early Japanese poets, including Kūkai— founder of the Shingon Buddhist sect. Ingram quotes Kūkai: Differences exist between matter and mind, but in their essential nature they remain the same. Matter is no other than mind; mind, no other than matter. Without any obstruction, they are interrelated. The subject is the object; the

object, the subject. The seeing is the seen, and the seen is the seeing. Nothing differentiates them. Although we speak of the creating and the created, there is in reality neither the creating for the created.19 This striving for ontological Oneness with the encompassing landscape finds itself emphasized within the physically interconnected nature of bodies in the world via something as obviously fundamental as the food chain. Arguments for vegetarianism aside, Sallie McFague articulates a metaphor for a larger, enfolding divine 'body' in which all things have their being and find intrinsic belonging. In “Toward a New Cascadian Civil Religion of Nature” McFague outlines: What is gradually surfacing once again is the realization that the appropriate metaphor with which to imagine our relation to the world is not the individual in the machine, but bodies living within the body of the Earth. The food chain supports the centrality of this model: our eating transforms the body of the world into our bodies.20 McFague's thoughts on the Pacific Northwest bioregion—known as Cascadia—evoke a global awareness of biocide, while maintaining the value of sacred loci—by acting locally, and honouring the local—we find the sacred as intrinsic and communal. Thomas Berry—building on theological notions developed by Teilhard de Chardin in which Creation has its place within God—sees all of Nature as integral parts of God’s corporality. Berry developed the idea of the Ecozoic—an concurrently evoling era of evolutionary time to follow the Cenozoic, initiated 66 million years ago. The Ecozoic, says Berry, will bring us away from geocidal and biocidal tendencies, renewing "the Earth community with a new sense of its sacred dimension."21 Berry and Brian Swimme say in The Universe Story that while the mountain can be climbed, named, and understood in terms of geology and tectonics, "Mountains can also be understood as agencies in the world, participating in the ongoingness of the universe."22 For Swimme and Berry the mountain has intrinsic value in all its mountain-ness—as it does also with Snyder. This relates also to the sense of intimate inter-being Tang Dynasty poet HanShan—"Cold Mountain"—feels with the mountain on—(or in?)—which he lives, and from which he is eponymously known. Han-Shan is aware his external being—that of the civilization below and the artifice of culture—has rescinded to enable him to hybridize with the mountain: “What am I doing here? Why don’t I go home? [to the village] / I am

bound by the smell of the cinnamon trees! / … / Stripped free of flesh and hide, / All that remains is the core of truth.”23 By approximating a communal, evanescent, and ever-renewing Oneness with the elemental material of the mountain, Buddhism passes to Reiki deep reflection on the instantaneous interpenetration of All That Is. Essentially, Reiki is a quiet meditative reflection—an intentional pause—informed by this energetic inter-being, communion, and benediction. Reiki—in the tradition of the bodhisattva—recognizes the subjectivity of all natural phenomena, reserving dignity and compassion for an equivocating relationship between humans and Nature. Perhaps a similar step in the direction of recognizing the arboreal as equal in their being with humans and animals is the ordination of trees within the Thai Theravādan tradition. As commented on by Susan Darlington, “Most tree ordinations are aimed at local areas…” This endowing of priesthood upon select groves reifies trees as entities in their own right worthy of respect, health, and dignity by “… forbidding the cutting of any trees or killing of any wildlife within it.”24 Further defending the sentience of plants, Luce Irigaray—in Through Vegetal Being— considers the invaluable role trees and plants play in the cosmogenetic unfolding. Not only do they facilitate our presence on Earth in the first place—through the photosynthetic process and the production of oxygen and air filtration—they do so without any return or appreciation from the human realm. Irigaray reminds us, "all this happens discreetly. It is wonderful and can seem a miracle, but most of the people consider all that to be normal, owed to them, and to be consumed without praising nature...”25 Since the rise of agrarianism—and augmented by industrialization—humans have exploited plant resources for food, shelter, and urban and rural development. This exploitation—in which the nearly insurmountable biophilic tendency of the vegetal is taken for granted—is a failure to acknowledge the vital essence of air that pushes us continually toward an eschatology of asphyxiation—we race toward a utopic yet airless futurity. In the paradigms of late corporate capitalism consideration of the natural is deployed solely in terms of needs and opportunities for aggrandizement. Through taxonomic naming practices the organic is policed into finite identities. Irigaray notes, “Thus, instead of lingering before a tree—or a flower—to contemplate its singularity and meet it in its reality, we pass it, at best, thinking: it is an oak—or a daisy.”26

The subjectivity of Nature is irrelevant to the production of timber, arable land, and access to geologic resources. Combined with a lack of biophilic awareness in popular Western culture, Nature has become a trivialized and often inconveniencing force. The continued assumption that humans are the primary sensing and feelings subjects of the world is symptomatic of our current climate of acute anthropocentric self-actualization. Considering this, the endeavour of holding open, compassionate, and listening hearts to the vegetal realm seems a far-off realization despite its apparent urgency. Reiki seems to me to be a vestige—however altered with modern admixtures—of something of the world’s ancient biocentric wisdom—a wisdom of encompassing and permeating connectedness. The ontological Oneness espoused by Reiki philosophy implies an ecotheology as defined. Diane Stein—in her seminal 1995 text Essential Reiki— comments on a necessity to bring a renewed Earth-focused and creative soteriology for terrestrial life—particularly human civilization—away from a path of separation and destruction: It is necessary to respiritualize Earth people to give their lives value and meaning. Respiritualizing means saving the Earth, reconnecting the DNA, and learning who we really are... Reiki plays a vital part in this process. The healing system reconnects people with their Earthly and Heavenly Ki (their connection to Earth and the stars), and reopens abilities humans have for many centuries forgotten. Learning the nature of these abilities, what they are, and how and why they happen, means learning the nature of the life force.27 Stein’s “respiritualization” suggests the attention to breath and inhalation noted by Irigaray. Through conscious and creative “inspiration” we invoke and acknowledge the spiritual in/to the mundane—our bodies—the natural. Each breath draws into our lungs the nourishing—yet potentially eviscerating—ki/qi. All that has traditionally been considered in the West inert, finite, objectified retains a sacred potential. We might begin this process of re-enchanting the world by endowing with intentional and sacred awareness something as corporal as breathing. In expressing gratitude to the vegetal for providing an oxygenated atmosphere, we meditatively connect with and become aware of our boundless interpenetration within All That Is—what Reiki practitioners would call hon sha ze sho nen.

NOTES 1. Stephanie Kaza and Kenneth Kraft, ed., Dharma Rain: Sources of Buddhist Environmentalism (Boston: Shambhala, 2000), 63. 2. Bronwen and Frans Stiene. The Japanese Art of Reiki: A Practical Guide to SelfHealing (New York: O Books, 2005), 8. 3. Ibid., 67. 4. Patricia Adams Farmer, “The Numinosity of Rocks,” in Replanting Ourselves in Beauty: Toward an Ecological Civilization, ed. Jay McDaniel & Patricia Adams Farmer (Anoka, MN: Process Century Press, 2015), 81. 5. William LaFleur, “Enlightenment for Plants and Trees,” in Dharma Rain: Sources of Buddhist Environmentalism, ed. Stephanie Kaza & Kenneth Kraft (Boston: Shambhala, 2000), 109. 6. Kaza & Kraft, ed., Dharma Rain, 23. 7. Ibid., 29. 8. Ibid., 29. 9. Ibid., 30. 10. Ibid., 31. 11. Ibid., 46. 12. Ibid., 21. 13. Ibid., 22. 14. Ibid., 33. 15. Graham Parkes, “Voices of Mountains, Trees, and Rivers: Kūkai, Dōgen, and a Deeper Ecology,” in Buddhism and Ecology: The Interconnection of Dharma and Deeds, ed. Mary Evelyn Tucker & Duncan Rỵ̣̣ūken Williams (Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 1997), 113. 16. Gary Snyder, “Blue Mountains Constantly Walking,” in Dharma Rain: Sources of Buddhist Environmentalism, ed. Stephanie Kaza & Kenneth Kraft (Boston: Shambhala, 2000), 127. 17. Stiene, The Japanese Art of Reiki, 12.

18. Ibid., 13. 19. Paul O. Ingram, “The Jeweled Net of Nature,” in Buddhism and Ecology: The Interconnection of Dharma and Deeds, ed. Mary Evelyn Tucker & Duncan Rỵ̣̣ūken Williams (Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 1997), 77. 20. Sallie McFague, “Toward a New Cascadian Civil Religion of Nature,” in Cascadia: The Elusive Utopia, ed. Douglas Todd (Vancouver: Ronsdale, 2008), 164. 21. Thomas Berry, Selected Writings on the Earth Community, ed. Mary Evelyn Tucker & John Grim (Maryknoll, NY, 2014), 136. 22. Brian Swimme and Thomas Berry, The Universe Story: From the Primordial Flaring Forth to the Ecozoic Era—A Celebration of the Unfolding of the Cosmos (New York, Harper, 1992), 41. 23. Kaza & Kraft, ed., Dharma Rain, 55. 24. Susan M. Darlington, “Tree Ordination in Thailand,” in Dharma Rain: Sources of Buddhist Environmentalism, ed. Stephanie Kaza & Kenneth Kraft (Boston: Shambhala, 2000), 198. 25. Luce Irigaray and Michael Marder, Through Vegetal Being: Two Philosophical Perspectives (New York: Columbia, 2016), 43-44. 26. Ibid., 46. 27. Diane Stein, Essential Reiki: A Complete Guide to an Ancient Healing Art (Berkeley: Crossing, 1995), 78.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Berry, Thomas. Selected Writings on the Earth Community, ed. Mary Evelyn Tucker and John Grim. Maryknoll, NY, 2014. Darlington, Susan M. “Tree Ordination in Thailand.” In Dharma Rain: Sources of Buddhist Environmentalism, ed. Stephanie Kaza and Kenneth Kraft. Boston: Shambhala, 2000, 198-205. Farmer, Patricia Adams. “The Numinosity of Rocks.” In Replanting Ourselves in Beauty: Toward an Ecological Civilization, ed. Jay McDaniel and Patricia Adams Farmer. Anoka, MN: Process Century Press, 2015, 80-83. Ingram, Paul O. “The Jeweled Net of Nature.” In Buddhism and Ecology: The Interconnection of Dharma and Deeds, ed. Mary Evelyn Tucker and Duncan Rỵ̣̣ūken Williams. Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 1997, 71-88. Irigaray, Luce and Michael Marder. Through Vegetal Being: Two Philosophical Perspectives. New York: Columbia, 2016. Kaza, Stephanie and Kenneth Kraft, ed. Dharma Rain: Sources of Buddhist Environmentalism. Boston: Shambhala, 2000. LaFleur, William. “Enlightenment for Plants and Trees.” In Dharma Rain: Sources of Buddhist Environmentalism, ed. Stephanie Kaza and Kenneth Kraft. Boston: Shambhala, 2000, 109-116. McFague, Sallie. “Toward a New Cascadian Civil Religion of Nature,” in Cascadia: The Elusive Utopia, ed. Douglas Todd. Vancouver: Ronsdale, 2008, 157-174. Parkes, Graham. “Voices of Mountains, Trees, and Rivers: Kūkai, Dōgen, and a Deeper Ecology.” In Buddhism and Ecology: The Interconnection of Dharma and Deeds, ed. Mary Evelyn Tucker and Duncan Rỵ̣̣ūken Williams. Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 1997, 111-128. Snyder, Gary. “Blue Mountains Constantly Walking.” In Dharma Rain: Sources of Buddhist Environmentalism, ed. Stephanie Kaza and Kenneth Kraft. Boston: Shambhala, 2000, 125-140. Stein, Diane. Essential Reiki: A Complete Guide to an Ancient Healing Art. Berkeley: Crossing, 1995. Stiene, Bronwen and Frans. The Japanese Art of Reiki: A Practical Guide to SelfHealing. New York: O Books, 2005.

Swimme, Brian and Thomas Berry. The Universe Story: From the Primordial Flaring Forth to the Ecozoic Era—A Celebration of the Unfolding of the Cosmos. New York, Harper, 1992.