There is a small parable near the front of Tomita Kaiji’s 1933 book on Reiki, Reiki and the Benevolent Art of Healing (Reiki to jinjutsu: Tomita-ryū teate ryōhō), and it is a story about why books don’t work.
A king walks into a shop looking for texts on how to become a better ruler. An old man stops him. He is a factory worker, still in his work clothes, and he makes car axles for a living. Books, he says, are useless for this. The king, insulted, threatens to cut him down, and the old man doesn’t flinch. He is over seventy. He has spent his whole life making axles that can be neither too thick nor too thin, and he has never once been able to put that skill into words. He can’t teach it to his own son. He can’t explain it to his grandsons. Every day, from before dawn until the stars come out, he stands at his workbench with a file, shaping metal, because working is the only place the knowledge lives. The king goes home and buys nothing.
I know that old man.
I spent years learning a Japanese style of karate that emphasized full-contact fighting, and it is built almost entirely from the kind of knowledge the old man is talking about. Timing. Distance. Knowing a strike is coming a half-second before it lands, and being somewhere else when it does. None of it comes off a page. You earn it on the dojo mat, taking and throwing strikes, or you don’t really have it. So when I found this parable, I already knew it was true.
Tomita studied directly under Usui Sensei, and his book has only recently been translated into English. It is one of the very few first-hand records we have of what Usui Sensei actually taught. What struck me is that Tomita says the same thing the old man says, and says it plainly. This therapy, he writes, was not assembled by human knowledge but taught by nature. You don’t learn it by understanding it. You learn it by doing it, on as many people as you can, until the hands know.
My own teacher is Brian Brunius, and the practice didn’t reach me through a book either. It reached me the way it always has—through the hands, from someone who already carried it. Which is what makes his part in this one fitting. Brian designed the cover and the interior, wrote a foreword, and spent years getting Tomita into English at all. And every page of it says the reading is not the teaching. He didn’t do the work to hand us the skill in a book. He did it to put our hands back on people.
Reiki and the Benevolent Art of Healing: Tomita-Style Hands-On Therapy (Reiki to jinjutsu: Tomita-ryū teate ryōhō), by Tomita Kaiji. Translated by Dylan Luers Toda. Edited by Justin B. Stein. Cover design and interior layout by Brian Brunius. Reiki Centers of America, New York, 2025.
