Exploring the Reiki Precepts

If you’ve taken a course with me, you know that Reiki is made up of five key pillars: meditations, Reiki precepts, attunements, healing with the hands, and symbols and mantras.

No doubt, Usui, the founder of Reiki, loved them all, but from what I’ve gathered, he had a particular soft spot for the Reiki precepts.

This might surprise some modern practitioners who equate Reiki with healing with the hands (‘teate’ in Japanese), but the more you work with the precepts, the more you realise how important they are.

Perhaps that is why the five precepts are inscribed on Usui’s Memorial Stone, and why they are prefaced there by the following words:

招福の秘法 – shōfuku no hihō

萬病の霊薬 – manbyō no reiyaku

Translated, they read:

The secret method for inviting happiness (blessings)

The spiritual medicine for all illness.

So the idea isn’t simply that they’re a nice philosophy. Rather, it’s that they are powerful and transformative, even in the realm of healing.

But since philosophy is not only hard to embody but also something that fades quickly, the inscription continues:

朝夕誦念五戒、銘記於心 – chōseki shōnen gokai, meiki o shin

Morning and evening, recite/chant the Five Precepts and engrave/keep them in the heart-mind.

As the saying goes, ‘Repetition is the mother of skill’, so if we want to live the precepts, we need to keep them front and centre each day.

Even so, appreciating the essence of the precepts can be a challenge, all the more so since their meaning is often lost in translation, and, as a result, many modern Reiki practitioners give them little more than lip service.

So in this article, I’d like to go even deeper into the precepts than I do in my courses and explain not only some subtleties of their translation, but also why the precepts are such an important part of our Reiki practice.

Ultimately, I believe the precepts can help us become more intentional in how we think about and experience the world, and more intentional about what we place in our minds. Because one way or another, our minds are going to fill up with something, so the question is simply whether we’re happy with the societal default.

If we are, and if we’re happy to use the same ‘operating system’ as society at large, we don’t need to do anything. But if that doesn’t appeal to us, we’ll need to be more intentional about what we feed our minds.

And that’s where the precepts come in, for they can help us to pre-program our minds with an operating system of our choice.

Personally, I find them to be like having a Zen master by my side during the day. If I have said the precepts in the morning and I get irritated by something during the day, then I quickly catch myself. I’ve locked in an operating system that notices such things, an operating system that steers me down more constructive paths.

A Guide to Greater Energy and Wellbeing

While the origin of the precepts is not 100% clear, it seems that Usui based them on an assortment of influences, in particular Buddhist writings and the poetry/teachings of the Meiji Emperor.

Perhaps it is not surprising, then, that the five precepts are prefaced by the words ‘Just for today’ (今日丈けは).

This is a key point because it makes them both more realistic and actionable. If we had to vow never to get angry for the rest of our lives, then we’d be immediately assailed by doubt. But by shortening our focus simply to today, we make it more manageable. Sure, we might still get irritated, annoyed or angry today, but if so, we can at least reset and start again tomorrow.

What’s more, the characters for today (今日) literally mean ‘now day’. So it is something very concrete, very ‘Zen’. We’re not asked to think beyond today, and in a sense, we’re not even asked to think beyond the ever-present now. For it is here in the present moment that we should strive to live the precepts.

The First Precept

怒るな — okoru na

Usual translation: Do not anger / Do not get angry.

In a sense, we might see the first two precepts (Do not anger / Do not worry) as a pair, since they both examine ways in which we dissipate energy.

Whenever we get angry or irritated, or whenever we worry or are anxious about something, we burn up a little bit of energy (chi) – energy that could be more constructively used in other ways.

If you’re uncertain just how much we are drained by negative emotions like anger and worry, then cast your mind back to the last time you really cracked it. The last time you really lost your temper. No doubt you felt flat and drained afterwards, because in your fury you burned up a lot of energy.

And it’s the same with worry. Think about it: people who suffer from extreme anxiety often find it difficult even to get out of bed in the morning. The anxiety and worry have drained all the life force from them.

Naturally, most of us, most of the time, don’t live on such extreme levels, but even the milder forms of anger and worry drain us of energy, even if it’s more like the dripping of a tap than a gushing torrent.

But if you think of a dripping tap, you remember how, if you put a bucket under it one day and come back the next, it’s often half full. So even those metaphorical drips can add up to a lot of energy.

So if we can reduce the drips, then we’ll retain more life force to use in a positive way.

Understanding ‘Anger’

If we study the characters for the first precept, we discover a few subtleties that can help us go deeper into the meaning of it.

In particular, it’s worth noting that the character for anger (or rage, wrath) 怒 contains 心 at the bottom, which means heart-mind. So in this context, anger/rage is a state that grips the heart-mind.

So we might more faithfully translate the precept as something like ‘For today only, do not let anger take hold of the heart-mind.’

Or more simply: ‘Just for today, do not be carried away by anger.’

In this sense, it’s not so much about suppressing anger as not letting ourselves become possessed by it.

The Second Precept

心配すな — shinpai suna

Usual translation: Do not worry

Here we once again see 心, i.e., ‘heart’, ‘mind’, ‘spirit’, ‘inner life’.

This is coupled with 配, which means ‘distribute’, ‘arrange’, ‘allocate’, ‘apportion’.

So when you add the すな (do not), you arrive at a translation that means something like: Do not scatter your life force (or heart, spirit or mind).

‘Worry’, therefore, is the scattering of life force into possible futures, the mind leaving the body, the heart dividing itself among what may never happen.

Of course, never worrying and never getting angry isn’t simple, but a key thing to note about the precepts (especially these first two) is that they are not necessarily about perfection.

It isn’t all or nothing, a pass or a fail.

For instance, maybe I do get worried about something, but instead of getting worried about it on a level 9/10, I get worried about it on a level 7/10.

Far from perfect, yes, but an improvement, and I save a little bit of energy right there.

Or maybe instead of worrying about something all day, I only worry about it for a few hours.

Again, not perfect, but I’ve saved a lot of energy by not worrying for an entire day, and every drop of energy helps.

The Third Precept

感謝して — kansha shite

Usual translation: Be grateful / give thanks.

Here we once more see the radical 心 (heart, mind) in the first character 感 (kan), which means ‘feeling’, ‘sensing’, ‘being moved’.

Together with 謝 (sha – ‘thanks’, ‘gratitude’, ‘acknowledgement’, ‘apology’), it means not just gratitude (the standard translation), but also the heart-mind being moved and then giving thanks.

The characters して mean ‘doing’, and this makes the gratitude active. So the precept becomes ‘Practise gratitude’, or more poetically, ‘Give thanks from the heart-mind’.

So it is something that starts deep down in the very core of your being, something you consciously acknowledge, something you will hopefully express to others.

What’s more, you might see it as an antidote to anger and worry. Anger binds the heart-mind to what has happened. Worry scatters it into what might happen, and gratitude returns the heart-mind to the good things in the present moment.

In short, anger and worry take you out of your heart-mind space, while the practice of gratitude anchors you in it.

So a more accurate translation might be something like: ‘Practise gratitude from the depths of your being’.

The Fourth Precept

業をはげめ — gyō o hageme

Usual translation: Be honest in your work / Work diligently.

Of all the precepts, this one might be the hardest to translate. Indeed, the standard translations lack the nuance and feel of what the precept strives to convey.

Most of the issues revolve around the first character 業 (gyō), which doesn’t just mean ‘work’, but also ‘task’, ‘profession’, ‘occupation’, ‘deed’, ‘action’, and in Buddhist contexts, even ‘karma’.

So the precept is about a lot more than simply your work or how you earn a living.

When coupled with はげめ (hageme – often written as 励め), meaning ‘strive’, ‘endeavour’, ‘apply yourself’, ‘be diligent’, it ultimately gives the precept a ‘Zen’/Buddhist flavour, for it’s now about giving everything you have to whatever you’re doing in the present moment.

It’s about being fully present in your actions.

It’s about giving each moment your heart and your soul, and ideally, doing it in such a way that contributes to society at large (業 also carries the sense of our conduct in daily life and the mission or role we fulfil).

The Fifth Precept

人に親切に — hito ni shinsetsu ni

Usual translation: Be kind / Show compassion to others

Literally this means ‘Be kind to people’.

人 (hito) means ‘person’, ‘human being’, ‘people’, and the second character に (ni) means ‘to’, ‘toward’. So we’re not talking about an abstract kind of kindness, but rather one directed towards people.

The next characters 親切 (shinsetsu) mean ‘kindness’, ‘helpfulness’, ‘consideration’, where the first part 親 (shin) means ‘parent’, or, in this compound, something closer to ‘intimacy’, ‘closeness’, ‘familiarity’, or ‘kinship’.

The second character 切 (setsu), which can at times mean ‘cut’, here means something more like ‘earnestness’, ‘intensity’, or something ‘deeply felt’.

So 親切 is warm-hearted kindness. It’s the kind of care that treats another person more as family than a stranger or object.

Ultimately, we might translate the precept as something like:

Just for today, treat others with warm, wholehearted kindness.

Conclusion

While I’ve taken a deep dive into the precise language and characters that form the Reiki precepts, their wisdom and power are usually revealed to us more through meditation than intellectual analysis.

That’s why in my courses we spend more time meditating on them than discussing them.

Much of spiritual practice is about learning to embody what we know.

For it’s one thing to understand something intellectually and another to feel it deep down.

So while this article hopefully gives you deeper insight into some of the nuances of the five precepts, ideally, you’ll also spend time meditating on them.

And if you do that a couple of times a day, even if only for a few minutes (as Usui suggested), then you’ll no doubt find that they help to positively guide your daily actions and make you less reactive to external circumstances.

Then, just like Usui, you’ll likely start to appreciate them as a major part of the Reiki system.

(Article by Jeremy O'Carroll)

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