Making “Reiki.”

Every time I watch the beautiful, even stunning, movie “Zen,” about the life of Dogen Zenji, the 13th-century Zen Master and founder of Soto Zen—the Zen we all think of when we think of Zen today worldwide—I wish someone would make a movie called “Reiki” about the life of our Founder, Mikao Usui. “Zen” is so visually rich; it conveys so much through imagery. What a man, and what a story!

Yet Usui Founder’s story is equally deep and rich, with many, many elements, from his family’s samurai origins to his prosperous upbringing thanks to the family sake brewery to his unquenchable thirst for knowledge, his numerous attempts to find a job that suited him, his wife and children, his travels, his religious studies, and his discovery and development of Reiki. And all of this set in turbulent times: Mikao Usui was born under the Shogunate, the high flowering of Samurai culture, when Japan was closed to all outside contact. (If you’ve seen the series “Shogun,” or any films set during that era, you’ll know whereof I speak.) Then the Meiji Emperor took back control from the samurai and opened Japan to the West, enjoying and embracing aspects of Western culture, a move Usui Founder wholeheartedly supported. And he survived the terrible earthquake and fires that leveled much of Tokyo in the 1920s, healing thousands with Reiki in the process.

I can see an absolutely gorgeous, moving film along the lines of “Zen” documenting and celebrating Mikao Usui’s life. I wish I could afford to find the fabulous Japanese crew who made “Zen,” hire them to make “Reiki,” and bring Hyakuten Inamoto Sensei, the founder of Komyo Reiki, the Reiki of Enlightenment, on board as script and set advisor. What a wonderful film it would be!

It’s true that nobody knows more than the details of Dogen’s life, yet that didn’t keep them from reimagining it from his extensive writings into a fabulous movie. In Usui Founder’s case, there were no writings—perhaps he didn’t think they were important, or perhaps he planned to write later in life, not foreseeing his own foreshortened life—so his life and work is preserved through his disciples, his students, as the Lord Jesus’s and the Lord Buddha’s were through theirs. In every case, those who came after found something worth preserving, something worth passing on, and in every case, they linked that back to their Founder, the one whose words, whose actions, whose promises they’d believed.

I cannot think of a single quote of Usui Founder’s that has been passed down to posterity. There are no parables, no stories, no directives, no pointed one-liners. Not even a memorable witticism, such as Saint John XXIII’s famous remark when asked by a journalist how many people worked in the Vatican, “About half of them.” The closest we can come to the mind of Usui Founder is in his actions and in the Five Reiki Principles (aka Precepts, Ideals) he gave us for right health, right happiness, and right livelihood.

His photo is here before me as I type. I wish I could hear his voice. I wish I could see a beautiful movie of his life and rest in it as I rest in “Zen.”

Just for today, practice the Principles.