Mikao Usui wanted the system of Reiki to go out into the world and be available to anyone, anywhere; he said so in the early question-and-answer manuals. What he did not say was that it should become a different practice. He built a system grounded in Japanese culture. Take it out of that and you are no longer practising the system of Reiki; you are appropriating it and changing its foundation.

In Japan the practice is internal and meditative, strengthening the hara and working from the inside; in the West it is external, about doing things. And in Japan the precepts are the foundation under everything, the treatments, the Reiju, the meditation, and also the point of it all. If we are the precepts, we are Reiki.