HSZSN is the acronym used to refer to the ‘distant healing symbol’, familiar in its various guises to anyone who has attended a Second Degree Reiki course.
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.
Chinese whispers
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.
Merging the separate symbols
If you look at the image, you can see that the bottom part of the first kanji looks rather like the top part of the second kanji, so you could move the upper kanji downwards so that the ‘cross’ overlaps, producing one composite figure.
Similarly the bottom section of the second kanji looks rather like the top section of the third kanji, so they could be merged and overlapped. And so on down the line.
And that’s how the composite HSZSN was formed!
Over to you
Have a look at the distant healing symbol that you were given.
See if you can work out what has changed, and what has stayed the same, compared to the original characters.
Post a message below to let me know what you discovered.
What do you think of the ‘expanded’ HSZSN?
Want to find out more about Distant Healing?
You can read more about HSZSN and distant healing methods in the 110-page Reiki Evolution Second Degree manual.
This isn’t just available to Reiki Evolution students: anyone can work with our manuals.
You can order a professionally-printed copy, or you can download your manual right now.
Here are the links that you need:
Author: Taggart King
