Before her death in 1980, Hawayo Takata initiated twenty-two Reiki masters — the teachers she entrusted to carry the practice on. Almost all Western Reiki traces back to one of them.
Takata’s students
Takata taught Reiki in Hawaii and across North America for some forty years, but she trained masters only late in her life. The twenty-two she initiated became the seed from which Western Reiki grew, each carrying her lineage and her way of teaching out into the world.
Carrying the lineage
After Takata’s passing, these masters spread Reiki widely across the United States, Canada, and Europe. Because they taught in different places and in slightly different ways, the practice both reached an enormous number of people and began, naturally, to branch.
Alliance and branches
Some of the masters came together to form the Reiki Alliance, recognising Takata’s granddaughter, Phyllis Lei Furumoto, as lineage bearer of Usui Shiki Ryoho. Others taught independently, and over time their students founded new styles. The many schools of Western Reiki nearly all lead back, one teacher at a time, to this small group.
A living lineage
The story of the twenty-two masters explains why Western Reiki is at once so widespread and so varied. It is a living lineage — passed hand to hand, teacher to student — rather than a fixed institution, and that is very much in the spirit of how Reiki has always travelled.
The exact list of the twenty-two masters is recorded slightly differently across sources, but their role as the bridge from Takata to modern Reiki is widely agreed.