The Onmyoji: A Quiet Hegemony of the Calendar

The work of the onmyoji was to make the calendar fit the age and to judge the fortune of each day and the taboos of directions. As a result, as technicians who managed "time," they were able to sit inside Japan's power structure for more than a thousand years. Yet why the onmyoji could enter the core of power, how quietly their influence lasted, and what flowed from it into the base layer of the present is not spoken of. So first let us look at their source.

What matters is that the band of technicians called onmyoji was not transmitted from China; the wisdom held by the Chinese yin-yang masters came into Japan in fragments, one after another, and in the end, by being integrated and sublimated, the onmyoji of the Japanese side came to be born on their own. For this reason, though it may be unexpected, the first carriers who brought to Japan the divination, calendar methods, and sorcery that go with the onmyoji were the monks that came with Buddhism, which came to Japan in the sixth century. At a glance there seems to be no correlation between onmyoji and monks, but in fact in Japan the two were bound together at a deep level.

But the present calendar is dry and dull. After all, we human beings were not born to be managed as workers, and there is no reason to be bound by a calendar on that premise. Where it is reasonable religiously, or as faith, it might do, but outside that there should be no need to follow it. On this point, a calendar in its original sense is "time," which surrounds us, turned into something visible. In ancient China, which had a great effect on Japan's calendar, the calendar was a tool both for recording the past and for predicting the future, and this character makes the calendar something familiar and commonplace and at the same time profound and hard to grasp.

As modern calendar practice has been standardized in the view above, a world line surely exists in which "the one who holds the calendar holds the world." Perhaps what humankind must look at is "who holds the calendar." After the pandemic, for example, remote work and the like took hold, but the frame of the calendar as "management of workers" has not changed at all. The calendar in every age has the character of reflecting the self-display of rulers, and because it has that character, a particular group that can handle the calendar can gain power. In Japan's case, that was the onmyoji.

Tenmu, who won the civil war of 672 over the succession to the throne and himself took the throne as the fortieth emperor (r. 673–686), advanced the building of a centralized ritsuryo state modeled on Tang, a civilized country. And, in fact, Tenmu himself was an onmyoji. Before his accession he sensed signs of civil war, took the tonsure, and trained in the mountains of Yoshino in Nara Prefecture, but this was not because he had given up the succession: it was that he knew Tenji (Tenmu's elder brother), the emperor of the time, lay ill and that his death was near. That is, Tenmu carried out the cover of "taking the tonsure" in order to launch a war over the succession as soon as Tenji died. Planning the timing of a war from the calendar is of a kind with Zhuge Liang in the Three Kingdoms.

In this interval, Tenmu learned and mastered astrology and divination with boards. The one who gave him this wisdom was En no Gyoja, then the foremost sorcerer. He is the founder of Shugendo, which links to the later Kumano Kodo, but its source lay in a technique of mixing several kinds of wisdom in his own way. That is, through En no Gyoja, Tenmu, before his accession, was given sorcery, and together they worked out the timing for seizing the throne and devoted themselves to preparation.

And the time of starting the civil war, the plan, and whom to make allies were drawn up using the wisdom of the onmyoji, and in 672 he started the civil war and won superbly. When this experience of Tenmu himself of using onmyodo bound splendidly with his later rule, the world in which the onmyoji would rise was prepared.

The greatest reason is the building of the capital cities. If the rise of the onmyoji lay in the state monopoly on divination, what made their standing decisive was the building of capital cities that the ritsuryo state brought. And although it was Tenmu who first officially issued the ritsuryo system, it was carried out in earnest in the age of the next, the forty-first, Empress Jito (r. 690–697), and the forty-second, Emperor Monmu (r. 697–707). The real leader from Jito to Monmu was Fujiwara no Fuhito.

The room for the onmyoji to work arose in close relation to these capitals. For in an artificial city with no festivals or taboos rooted in the old land, the calendar's good and ill fortune of days and taboos of directions made a ground for being accepted by nobles as new rules of life.

The father, Kamo no Tadayuki, from the line of the calendar way, was a noble but known as the leading onmyoji of his time and was the sorcerer the emperor trusted most. His deeds are almost unknown, but one account says he served as head of the Onmyoryo. And the eldest son, Kamo no Yasunori, was an onmyoji no less able than his father. Yasunori won the trust of the emperor and nobles and held in turn the posts of calendar scholar and head of the Onmyoryo. He was, in a sense, the great master of this way.

Further, not limited to the calendar, the decisive moment of the rise of the Kamo came when the Tendai monk Nichien brought back from China a calendar method called the "Futen-reki." This Futen-reki was a calendar method devised by a Tang astronomer in the late eighth century, but it was not adopted by the Chinese state. When it came to Japan, though, it was adopted under Yasunori at the revision of the calendar in 958. Then Yasunori, who had taken the lead position of tightening his rule over the calendar way, became, though outside his specialty, also scholar of astronomy and widened his power. That is, under the onmyoji Yasunori, "calendar" and "astronomy" were united.

Both Yasunori and Seimei were rising specialists skilled in Rikujin-shiki. The Kamo and Abe, who answered demand, built a new system in which they took on the work of calendar, astronomy, and divination as a hereditary job of the family. At that moment technique was merged into bloodline, and they literally became symbolic presences that could not be replaced. Since the state let a particular clan monopolize that knowledge, the state could not move without them either. This was the mechanism by which the onmyoji sent roots into the core, quietly but firmly.

Scant records place his birth around 921, noting that he studied the occult sciences under the court diviners Kamo no Tadayuki and Kamo no Yasunori. Tracing the genealogy of this Kamo lineage leads back to one of the most enigmatic supernatural figures in all of Japanese history: En no Ozunu (634–706). Legends portray En no Ozunu as an immortal adept endowed with Taoist secrets, later revered within the cult of mountain sages; historically, he was a scion of the ancient Kamo clan. Though no contemporary documents from his lifetime survive, it is entirely conceivable that during his era, Taoist doctrines were absorbed in a far purer and more direct form than is commonly recognized.