How Many Reiki Symbols Are There? The Honest Answer Isn't Four

You sat in your Level II class, and your teacher drew three shapes on the board. Later, at Master level, a fourth. Four Symbols. Clean, complete, finished.

Then one evening you went looking online — perhaps for a clearer image of Hon Sha Ze Sho Nen, perhaps out of simple curiosity — and you found a chart with thirty. Another with sixty. Someone selling attunements to a Symbol you had never heard of. Someone else insisting there are only three, and that anyone teaching a fourth has departed from the tradition.

If that left you with a quiet, uncomfortable question — did my teacher leave something out? — this article is for you.

The short answer is that the number changes depending on where you stand. Not because people are careless, but because Reiki is not one river. It is a spring that has fed many rivers, and each one carries a different amount of silt.

Let me show you the whole landscape, and let me be clear at every step about which parts are documented, which are disputed, and which are held in tradition without documentation. That distinction matters more than the number itself.

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The short answer

• In the Western Usui system most people are taught four: Cho Ku Rei, Sei He Ki, Hon Sha Ze Sho Nen and Dai Ko Myo. Three at Level II, one at Master level.
• In some Japanese lines, the count is three — with no Master Symbol at all.
• Add Raku, and you have five. But Raku almost certainly did not come from Usui.
• Across the wider family of systems — Karuna, Tera Mai, Seichim, Shamballa, Angelic and dozens more — the count runs into the hundreds, though the sets overlap far more than anyone admits.
• And in several well-established systems the answer is zero, because they deliberately use no Symbols at all.
• In tradition, well beyond the reach of any document, the number given is larger still.

Each of those answers is true inside its own frame. None of them is the whole picture. So let us walk through the frames.

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Why nobody can give you a single number

What we can actually document about Usui's teaching is very little

This is the first thing to sit with, and most articles skip it: the surviving historical record of Mikao Usui's own teaching is thin. Not ambiguous — thin. Much of what circulates in Reiki communities today is story, interpretation and inherited memory, and a good deal of it contradicts itself.

That is not a reason for despair. It is simply the honest starting point, and any account that speaks about Usui's original curriculum with total confidence is telling you more about the speaker than about Usui.

Here is what we have.

Hiroshi Doi, a teacher trained within the Usui Reiki Ryoho Gakkai in Japan, has stated in a published interview with the International Center for Reiki Training that the Gakkai uses three Symbols — and that there is no fourth, no Master Symbol, and no mantra set in what he calls Dento Reiki, orthodox Reiki. He says he asked several Gakkai presidents and senior teachers directly, and none of them knew of a fourth.

Against that, the International House of Reiki has published the view that Dai Ko Myo was taught by Usui himself to advanced Shinpiden students individually, and simply is not shown in the modern Gakkai.

These two accounts cannot both be complete. I am not going to resolve them for you, because the evidence does not permit it. What you can take from the disagreement is more useful than a false answer: the question of whether Usui taught a fourth Symbol is genuinely open, and it has been open for a long time among people far closer to the source than either of us.

There is one more account worth knowing. William Lee Rand of the ICRT has written that Usui developed only three Symbols and no Master Symbol, and that Hawayo Takata introduced a Master Symbol for her Western students. That is Rand's own historical reconstruction rather than a primary document — but it comes from the single most institutionally influential voice in Western Reiki, and it agrees with Doi on the essential point.

The Western four

However the fourth arrived, this is the set almost every Western practitioner receives:

Symbol	Usually taught at	Common Western function
Cho Ku Rei	Level II	Focusing and amplifying — the "switch"
Sei He Ki	Level II	Mental and emotional work
Hon Sha Ze Sho Nen	Level II	Distance, and work across time
Dai Ko Myo	Master level	Initiation, and the Master's own practice

Three given at Reiki II, one at Reiki III, as the ICRT describes the standard structure. If your training followed this shape, nothing was withheld from you. You received the tradition as it has been transmitted in the West for decades.

Raku — the fifth that isn't Usui's

Raku appears in a great many Western charts as a fifth Symbol, usually with a note about grounding or sealing an attunement.

It does not come from Usui. It entered Western practice through Raku Kei Reiki, developed by Arthur Robertson after training with Iris Ishikuro, one of Takata's Masters. Rand's own account of that lineage describes the introduction of what were called Tibetan elements — including a Tibetan Master Symbol and the Violet Breath — alongside the Usui material.

Sources also use the word Raku inconsistently: sometimes for a drawn Symbol, sometimes for a lightning-bolt movement performed at the close of an attunement, sometimes loosely for the whole lineage. If you have wondered why Raku looks less like a Symbol and more like a gesture, that inconsistency is why.

None of this makes Raku useless. Practitioners have worked with it for forty years and value it. It simply is not Usui's, and honest charts should say so.

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The Japanese view: the Symbol is a door, not the room

There is a distinction in Japanese practice that Western training often loses, and it changes how the counting question feels.

In Japanese Reiki, the drawn shape is called shirushi. The spoken sound is called jumon — a mantra. Behind the mantra sits the older idea of kotodama, the spiritual power carried in sound itself. The International House of Reiki sets out this distinction directly, and in that framing the sound carries the weight, with the shape supporting it.

You can see the practical result in how the levels are structured. In Jikiden Reiki, which descends from Chujiro Hayashi through the Yamaguchi family, students are taught one shirushi at Shoden, the first level, and a jumon for distant work at Okuden. That is a different architecture from the Western one entirely — not fewer Symbols out of secrecy, but a different idea of what a Symbol is for.

Frans Stiene has gone further, arguing that Usui taught mantras first and that the drawn Symbols were introduced later, around 1923, largely as an accessible entry point for students without prior meditative training. In that view, as practice deepens, the need for the tools themselves diminishes. I should mark this clearly: that is Stiene's historical reconstruction and teaching position, not a claim resting on a primary Usui-era document.

And I want to give particular credit to a line from a Komyo ReikiDo and Jikiden school in Melbourne, which states plainly that Usui's original curriculum and Symbols are not fully known, and that no modern Reiki system can claim with certainty to represent his teaching exactly.

That is the most honest sentence I have found on this subject anywhere, from any lineage. It deserves to be repeated more often than it is.

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Counting the wider family — where counting starts to break down

Step outside the Usui trunk and the landscape opens up considerably. I want to map it in a way that describes each system on its own terms rather than ranking them, because a survey that quietly sorts schools into "real" and "not real" does damage — and because the sorting usually reflects who has the largest publishing operation rather than anything about the practice.

So instead of one verdict, three questions. None of them measures whether a system works.

1. Transmission — how does the system say its Symbols came to it? Derived from an existing lineage, received, or composed?
2. Provenance — is there a first-person account by the founder, a dated publication, a teaching body? Or only third-party description?
3. The set — is it fixed and published, or open and teacher-dependent?

Apply these honestly and something uncomfortable emerges immediately: Usui's own four score poorly on question two. There is no contemporaneous document, no dated first-person account of their origin, and the earliest teaching material remains inaccessible. Several of the modern systems below have a far better paper trail than the tradition they descend from. That is worth sitting with before anyone starts drawing lines.

First surprise: several major systems use no Symbols at all

This is the finding that reframes the whole question, and almost nobody mentions it.

Kundalini Reiki — Ole Gabrielsen — works through attunement and intention alone. Its manual states the system "does away with lots of complicated instructions, symbols and rituals," and that intent is the key. Practitioners confirm there are no Kundalini Reiki Symbols to learn. His Gold Reiki and Ethereal Crystals follow the same design: no Symbols, intention only.

Lightarian Reiki — Jeannine and Christopher Jelm, 1997 — states plainly that no new Symbols are used, and works through intention. It requires the Usui Master attunement as a prerequisite, so it builds on the four rather than adding to them.

Imara Reiki — Barton Wendel — has no Symbol; it is activated by a spoken phrase.

Shamballa is the most striking case, and I owe a correction here. The figure of 352 Symbols circulates widely — I had it myself from a practitioner source. It does not come from John Armitage. His own organisation states that the original "traditional symbol-based and grade-level approach proved restrictive," which is why the system was renamed New Paradigm MDT and the Symbol-and-grade structure replaced altogether. The 352 figure appears in third-party course marketing, not in the founder's materials. If you have been taught it as fact, you were taught something the founder moved away from.

Angelic Reiki — Kevin and Christine Core, 2002–03 — occupies a fascinating middle position: there are eight Symbols, but their shape, sound, drawing and meaning are deliberately not taught. You are not asked to learn them. You are asked to be in their presence.

Notice what all of these have in common. Each concluded, independently, that the Symbol is scaffolding — and each removed the scaffolding at a different moment. That is precisely what the Japanese tradition says about shirushi, arrived at by an entirely different route. The systems furthest from Usui in appearance keep rediscovering his emphasis.

Second surprise: the Symbols move between systems

Zonar, Halu and Harth appear in Tera Mai, in Karuna Reiki® and in Karuna Ki. Three systems, three founders, three different accounts of where the Symbols came from.

Kathleen Milner's own account is that Zonar, Harth and Halu came to her in 1991 through a spiritual contact she names, alongside Symbols contributed by named students and friends — a documented, accretive, openly-credited process. Rand's account of Karuna Reiki names several Reiki masters who brought him Symbols, Milner among them, with his own contribution being the attunement process, the sequencing and the name.

Read fairly, these accounts are less contradictory than they look. A pool of Symbols circulated through a community of practitioners in the early nineties; different people gathered, ordered and named them differently. What each founder genuinely created was a system — a curriculum, a sequence, an initiation structure. The Symbols themselves were moving between hands.

That is a more accurate and far less divisive picture than "who stole what from whom", and it is what the sources actually show.

Third: where the real fault line runs

It is not between lineages. It is over ownership.

Karuna Reiki® is a registered mark of the International Center for Reiki Training. Tera Mai™ has been on file since 1995, though Milner states she shares it freely with initiates. Rainbow Reiki®, Lightarian® and New Paradigm MDT are all registered. The Radiance Technique International Association holds not only "The Radiance Technique®" but also "Real Reiki®" and "Authentic Reiki®" — trademarks that make a claim in their very wording.

And Karuna Ki exists precisely as an answer to this. Vincent Amador's manual states that the name is not trademarked, is public domain, and may not legally be trademarked, and that the system is unaffiliated with Karuna Reiki® or the ICRT. Same Symbol family, deliberately released.

I am not going to tell you who is right. I will say that this is the only place in the whole landscape where I find a genuine disagreement of principle rather than a difference of practice — and that it is about names and licences, not about the Light.

The landscape

System	Originator	From	Transmission	Symbols
Usui Shiki Ryoho	Usui → Hayashi → Takata	early 20th c.	lineage	4 (3 + Master)
Usui Reiki Ryoho Gakkai	Japan	early 20th c.	lineage	3, per Hiroshi Doi
Jikiden Reiki	Hayashi → Yamaguchi	20th c.	lineage	1 shirushi at Shoden; jumon at Okuden
Komyo ReikiDo	Hyakuten Inamoto	modern	lineage	4
Gendai Reiki Ho	Hiroshi Doi	modern	lineage + conscious addition	4 (Doi states the 4th is not Dento Reiki)
The Radiance Technique®	Barbara Ray	1980s	claimed sole succession from Takata	the Usui set, held as closed; 7 degrees
Mari-El	Ethel Lombardi	1980s	one of Takata's 22 masters, own system	3
Raku Kei	Iris Ishikuro → Arthur Robertson	1980s	lineage + "Tibetan" additions	Usui set + Tibetan Master, Raku
Usui/Tibetan Reiki	William Lee Rand	1980s–90s	composed from the above	Usui 4 + Tibetan Master + Fire Serpent
Holy Fire	William Lee Rand	2014	received	replaced the earlier Master Symbols
Karuna Reiki®	William Lee Rand / ICRT	1993–95	Symbols brought by named masters, systematised	8 + Master
Karuna Ki	Vincent Amador	1999	composed from the same family, deliberately free	11–12
Tera Mai™ / Tera-Mai Seichem	Kathleen Milner	from 1991	received + contributed by named others	36 named
Seichim / SKHM	Patrick Zeigler	1980	received (Great Pyramid)	no canonical set
Sekhem-Seichim-Reiki	Diane Ruth Shewmaker	1999	downstream synthesis	11, across 7 facets
Rainbow Reiki®	Walter Lübeck	1987–89	Usui base + own research	Usui set + added material
Reiki Jin Kei Do	Seiji Takamori → Ranga Premaratna	named 1997	claimed lineage + Himalayan transmission	not enumerated publicly
Reiki Plus®	David Jarrell	1981	claimed Tibetan initiation + Takata lineage	4 practitioner + 2 master levels
Reido Reiki	Fuminori Aoki, Noriko Ogawa	modern, Japan	Japanese development	not enumerated in sources found
Shamballa / New Paradigm MDT	John Armitage	1994	received (Saint Germain), Atlantean claim	Symbols deliberately abandoned
Kundalini Reiki®	Ole Gabrielsen	modern, Denmark	received (Kuthumi)	none, by design
Gold Reiki / Ethereal Crystals	Ole Gabrielsen	modern	received	none, by design
Lightarian Reiki®	Jeannine & Christopher Jelm	1997	received (Ascended Master Buddha)	none; Usui Master required first
Angelic Reiki	Kevin & Christine Core	2002–03	synthesis + Archangel Metatron	8, deliberately not taught
Imara Reiki	Barton Wendel	modern	received	none; activated by phrase
Violet Flame Reiki	attributed to Ivy Moore	c. 2000	received (Kwan Yin)	~40 reported; no primary source found
Money Reiki	Stephanie Brail	2005	own insight, stated in first person	the dollar sign, + 3 at Level II
Medicine Dharma / Men Chhos	Richard Blackwell	c. 1994	claimed Tibetan text	claims never authenticated; community dissolved by 2002

One row in that table needs a word of caution rather than neutrality. Medicine Dharma Reiki rested on a claimed ancient Tibetan text that only its founder could produce, and authentication was promised and then repeatedly postponed. Paula Horan, who wrote the foreword to the book and taught the system, publicly withdrew when authentication never came. That is not a difference of lineage. That is a specific, documented failure, and the people who acted best in it were the teachers who said so publicly and stopped teaching.

And the long tail

Beyond these there are dozens more with real teachers and real students: Amanohuna, Ascension Reiki, Blue Star Celestial Energy, Buddho-EnerSense, Golden Age Reiki, Ichi Sekai Reiki, Jinlap Maitri, Saku Reiki, Sun Li Chung Reiki, Usui-Do, Vajra Reiki, Wei Chi Tibetan Reiki, Helen Belôt's Sekhem, and others. I have not documented these individually and I am not going to pretend otherwise by listing them as though I had.

If you teach one of them, or any system I have described imperfectly above, please write to me. This survey will be wrong in places — that is unavoidable in a field transmitted largely by hand and by memory — and I would rather correct it from the people who actually hold the lineage than defend a version I got from a search engine.

What tradition says, and how I hold it

Everything above is the documentary record. There is another kind of account, and I am not going to pretend it does not exist or quietly leave it out.

Several spiritual teachers place Reiki's origin far earlier than Usui — in Tibet, in Atlantis, in the work of the Ascended Masters. One of the more developed of these accounts holds that during the fall of Atlantis a Master went to Tibet with a group of disciples and channelled 432 original healing Symbols, most of which were subsequently lost, hidden or forgotten.

I want to be precise about the status of this. It is tradition, not documentation. There is no manuscript, no archaeology and no chain of custody. Anyone who presents it as historical fact is overstating what they can know.

And I would ask you to hold the opposite temptation just as loosely. Absence of a document is not evidence of absence. Most of what humanity has known has left no record at all; the written trail is a narrow beam of light across a very wide floor. The honest position is neither "this is history" nor "this is nonsense" but something more demanding: this is carried in tradition, it cannot be verified, and it may still be pointing at something true.

What I would resist is using such an account to justify a claim of authority — or a price. That is the practical test I apply, and I would suggest you apply it too. A teaching offered as tradition, openly, is a gift. The same teaching presented as proven history in order to sell an attunement is something else.

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Are they even Japanese words?

A question worth asking, since "Reiki symbol" and "Japanese kanji" are often treated as the same thing. They are not, uniformly.

Hon Sha Ze Sho Nen is a genuine phrase. Written 本者是正念, it is discussed by the International House of Reiki in connection with Tendai hongaku doctrine, the teaching that all things are already inherently awake. Its usual Western gloss — "no past, no present, no future" — is a compression of something considerably richer.

Sei He Ki is likewise a real compound: 性 (sei, essence or inner nature) and 癖 (heki, habit or craving), glossed by IHReiki as the habitual drive to rediscover our inner essence. Notice how far that sits from "the emotional Symbol."

Dai Ko Myo is described by Rand as a Zen expression meaning something close to treasure house of the great beaming light — a pointer to one's own true nature. I have not been able to trace that translation to a specific Buddhist text, so treat it as a well-established reading rather than a verified citation.

Cho Ku Rei is the least settled of the four. The independent researcher James Deacon has documented at least two competing kanji readings in circulation, along with Takata's own working gloss — put the power here — and raises the possibility that the drawn form is a stylisation of a character rather than a straightforward transliteration.

So: some of these are language, and some are shape. Both can work. But when someone hands you a confident kanji breakdown of Cho Ku Rei, it is worth knowing that the field does not agree.

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Why the number matters less than you think

Here is the part I most want you to take away.

Collecting another Symbol is not what deepens a practice. Staying with one is.

The Symbols are tools, not credentials. Intention alone moves energy — it will work without any Symbol at all. A Symbol is a lens: it takes something already radiating in every direction and brings it to a point. A second lens does not make the light brighter. Practice does.

So if the sprawl of names and systems has left you feeling behind, please set that down. You are not behind. Almost everything you will ever need is inside the four you were given, and most of it is inside the first one.

Begin with Cho Ku Rei. Live with it for a season. Draw it on your palms in the morning; notice, without deciding in advance, what changes. When it has genuinely settled into you — when a thought of it is enough and the hand movement has become optional — then the next Symbol will mean something when you meet it.

That is the order in which this actually works. Depth first. The catalogue can wait.

If and when you do want the catalogue, you are welcome to explore the ReikiPedia Symbol library, where each Symbol carries its attributes, its documented or claimed origin, and its pairings — so you can see, at a glance, which family a Symbol belongs to and how far it stands from the Usui root.

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So — how many Reiki Symbols are there?

Four, if you mean the Usui system as it is taught in the West. Three, in the Japanese lines that never adopted a Master Symbol. Five, if you count Raku, which came later and from elsewhere. Hundreds, across the wider family — though they overlap heavily, and the same handful travels under different names in different systems. Zero, in several well-established systems that concluded the Symbol was scaffolding and took it down. Far more still, in traditions that carry no documentation at all.

And one — the one you are actually working with today.

That last count is the only one that has ever changed anybody's practice.

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Frequently asked questions

What are the 3 Reiki symbols? Cho Ku Rei, Sei He Ki and Hon Sha Ze Sho Nen — the three taught at Reiki Level II in the Western Usui system. Some Japanese lineages teach only these three and have no fourth or Master Symbol at all.

How many symbols are in Usui Reiki? Four in the standard Western transmission: three at Level II and Dai Ko Myo at Master level. Hiroshi Doi has stated that the Usui Reiki Ryoho Gakkai in Japan uses three, with no Master Symbol — so the answer depends on which line you are asking about.

Is Raku a real Reiki symbol? Raku is widely used, but it did not come from Usui. It entered Western practice through Raku Kei Reiki, developed by Arthur Robertson after training with Iris Ishikuro. Sources also use the word inconsistently — sometimes for a drawn Symbol, sometimes for a movement performed at the end of an attunement.

How many symbols does Karuna Reiki have? Eight treatment Symbols plus a Master Symbol. Karuna Reiki® was developed by William Lee Rand between 1993 and 1995 and is a registered trademark of the International Center for Reiki Training.

Why do the symbols look different in different books? Because they were transmitted by hand and by memory across many teachers and several decades, and small variations accumulated. Choose one clear version of each that resonates with you and stay consistent with it; the constancy of your own practice matters more than matching someone else's chart.

Which Reiki systems use no symbols at all? Kundalini Reiki, Gold Reiki and Ethereal Crystals (Ole Gabrielsen), Lightarian Reiki and Imara Reiki all work through attunement and intention without a Symbol set. Shamballa, now taught as New Paradigm MDT, deliberately moved away from Symbols and grades — its founding organisation states the symbol-based approach proved restrictive. Angelic Reiki has eight Symbols but does not teach their shape, sound or meaning.

Are Karuna Reiki and Karuna Ki the same thing? They share most of their Symbols and much of their history, but they are separate systems. Karuna Reiki® is a registered mark of the International Center for Reiki Training. Karuna Ki was created by Vincent Amador as a deliberately free, non-trademarked alternative that anyone may teach and adapt.

Why do Zonar, Halu and Harth appear in several different systems? Because a pool of Symbols circulated among a community of practitioners in the early 1990s, and different teachers gathered, ordered and named them differently. Tera Mai, Karuna Reiki and Karuna Ki all include them, with different accounts of their origin. What each founder created was a system — a curriculum and an initiation structure — rather than the Symbols themselves.

Do I need an attunement to use Reiki symbols? Traditionally, yes — the Symbols are given within an initiation. There are other views, including well-established self-attunement practices, and this is one of the genuinely contested questions in Reiki. It deserves its own discussion rather than a line in a FAQ.

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This article separates what is documented from what is disputed and what is held in tradition. Where I could not verify a claim, I have said so rather than filling the gap. If you have primary-source material on any point above — particularly on the contents of Hayashi's manual, or on the first published appearance of the Symbols — I would genuinely like to see it.

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