It’s the trickiest of the symbols to get to grips with and usually has 20+ strokes or hand movements to draw it out.
HSZSN actually consists of five separate Japanese kanji which have all been overlapped and merged to produce one ‘composite’ kanji, which we see on courses.
In this blog I have posted an image of what these five separate kanji look like. The calligraphy was kindly brushed for me by the fantastically talented Japanese Calligraphy Shihan Eri Takase, who does all our Japanese writing for us, on our Reiki certificate templates, Reiki precepts prints, Reiki CDs and Reiki manuals.
When people attended Reiki courses in the past, many students and Masters weren’t provided with hard copies of the Reiki symbols and so had to reproduce them from memory. That perhaps wasn’t so bad for the simpler symbols like CKR and SHK, but for HSZSN this led to a process of “Chinese whispers”, where the drawings altered slightly each time they were taught.
So now, quite understandably, there are various versions of the symbols in existence, some closer to and some really quite different from the original Japanese source.
Eri’s calligraphy takes us back to the originals, though. It’s great to see the original individual characters that the symbol was based on.
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