The Stone That Spoke

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Language: en

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The Stone That Spoke

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‚Like a child in a sweet shop without allowance.‘
‚It made it clear that he did very much exist.‘

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There was the first time we saw something written about – presumably, presumably! – about Usui sensei.

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Of course, I didn’t know because I couldn’t read it. I said to my friends, ‚Wow! What is that? What does it say?‘

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So they look up.

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(mumbling) They look at each other.

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They don’t say anything. I’m … What’s going on?

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So I say, ‚Hey, tell me, what does it say? Wow, that’s incredible! Like the headline, what does it say?‘

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They look at each other and they go …. they don’t say anything.

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I think, ‚Some kind of conspiracy!‘. You know, they are trying to tease me or something or torture me. I don’t know what.

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So, again I say, ‚Come on, what does it say? Please tell me I’m dying.‘

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I’m so excited and he looks at me, Champak my friend, looks at me and says,

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‚Can’t read it, man.‘

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And then I’m like, ‚Hey, you went to school. I know your job. Don’t tell me you can’t read Japanese!‘

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And he said, ‚You know what? This is pre-World War II Japanese. I’m too young for that.‘ He is maybe two, three years older than me.

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‚I didn’t learn that at school. I can’t read it. Neither can she.‘

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So I’m standing there like somebody in the sweet shop.

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But without allowance to taste the sweets.

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Nothing. They’re all locked or something. The opening is too small for my hand. Like the monkey tried to…

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And I’m standing there going, ‚Oh my God, I just want to know what it says.‘

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But no way! I said, ‚But for sure you must be able to read something.‘

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So they say, ‚… (puffing) … comes from Kifu Prefecture ….

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‚… and then he went to Kyoto to Kurama mountain …‘

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So pieces, pieces they could read but could not make sense of the whole thing.

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Luckily, I was prepared!

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I had, I think, at least two still cameras. Maybe three and a video camera.

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And I took pictures of the memorial from all sides possible.

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And because it’s a big thing and my wide-angle lens wasn’t enough, I took pictures of parts of the thing.

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Later on, when I went to Sapporo, I let them develop and glued them together.

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And all the pictures ended up with a thing like this, the stone like this.

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And then gave that to Chetna’s mom, who was a school teacher, all her life.

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She was born in 1920, so she learned pre-war Japanese and pre-war Kanji.

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And she then translated that into contemporary Japanese.

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And this is the document I gave you before lunch, the transcription of that in her handwriting.

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And then from that we translated it into first English and then later on into German.

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That was incredible because it was really was the first time we had something written about him.

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That was a major breakthrough or THE major breakthrough, which of course – when we get to 1997, the publication of your first book –

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was a very central source of information.

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This was the first one! The one that blew me away, the one that made it clear that he did very much exist.

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On the memorial it stated that he had more than 2000 students.

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I thought, ‚Wow! More than 2000 students! There must be more, not only the one Koyama sensei whom we had talked about.‘

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And on the memorial also it said, clearly, that he had his spiritual experiences and enlightenment on mount Kurama.

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When I showed it to Chetna, she said, ‚Oh, that’s great, let’s go to Kyoto. I used to live close to Kurama when I was in university.

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We could go and visit the old neighbourhood where I used to live.‘

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Can I go back to 1994 thereabouts?

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We’re still there, this is like September.

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That’s right. But I don’t want to go down the alley of Mikao Usui and the graveyard.

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I see you now three years or so, you’ve been teaching Reiki in Japan …

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I don’t know at which point, but somewhere along the line it is said that it became apparent to you

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that the Western lineage operating from Raj had some doubts. And …

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I find it difficult to formulate a question around this at this point, but we will get there sooner or later.

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In 1994 … maybe it’s a good time to address it – you have to tell me –

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because the question here revolves around you acquiring another Western line, because there was some question marks about Raj’s.

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Should we talk about that now?

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We can talk about it now, I was a little bit early, but I came…

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Happy to go on later.

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I don’t know how we’re going to do this, are you going to move things around, the sequence in the filming? No.

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In the archive it will pretty much follow the sequence as we discuss it,

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but in the documentary-interview we’re going to change the sequences.

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You want to jump ahead now?

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When was the time you reacquired the western line, 1994-ish? Or was that … Okay, then let’s just postpone that question.

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Still in 1994, at one point you were speaking to your wife of Usui’s grandson, who told you that she heard…

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You were speaking to actually the grandson of Usui.

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Not yet.

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Not yet. We got their number, but before I talked to them, I went to Saihoji.

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So I went to Saihoji to the Usui memorial.

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Then we came back. We had the memorial text translated.

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And here we are, this was our last point in the story.

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Thank you to our sponsors! This video depicts a segment of a four-day interview with Frank Arjava Petter.

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For all videos and the list of sponsors visit our website:
www.reiki-conciliation.org

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Translation: AI
Transcript: René Vögtli