Twenty-six years ago, my Reiki instructor John Harvey Gray held up in class his only copy of the Grey Book. It was so precious to him that he would not let us students touch it. We crowded around him trying to get a good view, as he carefully turned the pages. I felt drawn to it by a strange power I had just begun to learn to sense and call “Reiki.” The Grey Book John held up felt as powerful to me as the initiations he had given each day in class.
A slim volume of about 75 pages, the Grey Book’s contents were drawn from Hawayo Takata’s Reiki documents and compiled after her death by her daughter, Alice Takata Furumoto. In 1982, Alice had 100 copies of the book printed. Its cover bore only the two Japanese kanji for Rei and Ki, printed in black ink on a grey linen paper. It was this grey paper, and the absence of an obvious English title, that led to the book being dubbed the “Grey Book.”
At the end of the book was a page signed by Alice Takata Furumoto, using what looked like a black felt pen. The page was stamped imposingly with three red Japanese seals. John read aloud to us, “The Legacy left Phyllis cannot be denied.” With those words, he began telling his story of Phyllis Lei Furumoto, of his participation in recognizing Phyllis as Hawayo Takata’s lineage bearer, and of founding The Reiki Alliance, a body of Masters that could support her evolution.
In 2017, I was attending a workshop in Arizona with Phyllis. During an intense exchange between us on the subject of “reconciliation,” she reached into her desk drawer and pulled out the four remaining copies of the Grey Book, striking me into silence. Of 100 original copies, she explained, 21 had been signed, stamped, and mailed to the Reiki Masters initiated and recognized by Hawayo Takata. The remaining 79 copies had been given to Phyllis. Some she had gifted to Reiki friends or students over the years; by 2017 only those four copies remained. And no, none of us could have one, but she promised she was going to have the book reprinted, with the Japanese text translated, “very soon.” She spent the rest of the day talking about reconciliation in Reiki, and her desire to set right the unintended negative consequences of past choices.
The Grey Book is a link to a past that feels both foreign and long ago, a bridge between Chujiro Hayashi’s Reiki classes in Japan and Hawaii, and the students of Reiki now spread worldwide almost 90 years later. The 21 signed and stamped copies of the Grey Book conferred an authority and authenticity upon those who initially received them. Although they inherited much from Takata Sensei, the book was one of the few tangible objects. It is my hope that by making this rare book widely available, the torch passed from Chujiro Hayashi to Hawayo Takata to Phyllis Lei Furumoto, and from her to Johannes Reindl and the global Reiki communities she taught, mentored, and vitalized, will now reach all who aspire to be students of Reiki, and carry them forward on the journey of being Reiki.
~Brian Brunius
New York City
March 31, 2021
