Student of Usui
Hayashi began studying with Mikao Usui in 1925, in the last year of Usui’s life, and was among the students who reached the highest level of the practice. After Usui’s death in 1926 he continued to develop and teach the method he had learned.
The Tokyo clinic
Hayashi opened his own clinic and society, the Hayashi Reiki Kenkyukai, in Tokyo. There he kept detailed records of sessions and organized the practice into the fuller sequence of hand positions that many practitioners still recognize today.
Organized the practice into a fuller, teachable sequence of positions.
Kept careful notes of sessions, drawing on his medical training.
Trained the students who carried Reiki beyond Japan.
Takata & the bridge west
In the mid-1930s a Japanese-American woman named Hawayo Takata came to his clinic for treatment, stayed to study, and eventually became a teacher. Through her, Hayashi’s structured form of Reiki travelled to Hawaii and then across the world. Hayashi died in 1940, but the lineage he shaped remains the one most widely practiced outside Japan.
A careful record
Hayashi’s medical background left its mark on everything he did with Reiki. Where the practice might have remained loosely held, he brought the habits of a clinician — noting what he observed, organising the hand positions into a teachable order, and keeping records of the sessions at his clinic.
It is largely this care that made the practice portable. Because Hayashi had set it down so clearly, it could be carried abroad and taught to people who had never seen Japan, and much of what the world now recognises as a "standard" Reiki session traces back to the order he established.