One of the 21 teacher students of Mikao Usui. According to Hyakuten Inamoto, he was a Sôtô Zen practitioner who naturally included Shintô into his personal practices. According to his student Hawayo Takata, Chûjirô Hayashi met and became a student of Mikao Usui in 1925. He was a retired naval officer (still in the reserves) and surgeon. The length of his study with Mikao Usui was relatively short as he only studied the teachings for approximately 10 months before Mikao Usui’s death in March 1926. According to Hiroshi Doi, he was the last shinpiden student of Mikao Usui. It is interesting to note that Chûjirô Hayashi didn’t teach the reiju but instead taught an attunement, which included the mantras and symbols, according to his student Chiyoko Yamaguchi.
Once he became a shihan, or teacher, he was expected to either ‘engage in the spread of Reiki Ryôhô and in Reiki treatments at the Gakkai Head Office’ or open up his own branch. As Chujirô Hayashi was a medical doctor, Mikao Usui felt that he should open a clinic for treatments. This, according to Hiroshi Doi, would ‘promote the efficacy of Reiki Ryôhô from a medical doctor’s point of view’. Naturally all results were to feed back to the Usui Reiki Ryôhô Gakkai. However, he broke away in 1931 developing his own branch called Hayashi Reiki Kenkyû Kai.
Chûjirô Hayashi is not known to have been recognized as the successor to Mikao Usui – if there was a successor within his known circle of fellow practitioners it would have been the president of the Usui Reiki Ryôhô Gakkai, Jûzaburô Ushida.
Chûjirô Hayashi created a healing guide called the Ryôhô Shishin. It appears to be an almost exact copy of the Ryôhô Shishin in the Reiki Ryôhô Hikkei, the healing guide from the Usui Reiki Ryôhô Gakkai of which Chujiro Hayashi had previously been a member. It is believed that he may have written both of these due to his medical expertise.
Chûjirô Hayashi wrote in 1938 that there were 13 fully qualified Reiki Masters but it is not known who all of these people were. From various reports it is believed that some of his teacher students were Tatsumi, Hawayo Takata, Chie Hayashi, and Chiyoko Yamaguchi plus Shûô Matsui who was not a teacher student.
Chûjirô Hayashi passed away on 10 May 1940. Hawayo Takata reported that he died ceremoniously of a self-induced stroke, Chiyoko Yamaguchi recounts that he had killed himself by ‘breaking an artery’, while others say that as he was a military man the honourable method of death would certainly have been seppuku.