Chitoku appears once, does something remarkable, and leaves. He has no cycle of legends, no shrine, no famous rival. He was a monk in Harima Province who practiced onmyōdō, the Way of Yin and Yang, and the Konjaku Monogatari-shū gives him a single tale — the one in which he calls a shipful of pirates back out of the sea.
What draws me to the account is that the compiler cannot quite decide how to rank him. Chitoku wields real power, and yet the tale ends by recording a moment when Abe no Seimei outmatched him. Is he Seimei’s equal who happened to lack one piece of knowledge, or a gifted provincial who never got inside the circle? The story does not settle it, and the uncertainty is more interesting than an answer would be.
One note on the text. The retelling in ONMYOJI expands the dialogue and renders some scenes in more detail. The summary below keeps to the classical source.[1]
A merchant ship is attacked by pirates off the coast of Akashi. The cargo is seized and the crew killed; only the owner and one servant survive, by throwing themselves into the sea.
Stranded on the beach, the merchant meets a wandering monk who tells him he means to have the pirates caught.
The story appears in Volume 24 of the Konjaku Monogatari-shū, the anthology compiled in the early twelfth century. Chitoku lived in Harima Province, in what is now the southwestern part of Hyōgo Prefecture. He wore Buddhist robes, but his expertise was onmyōdō, and he had long served the people of Harima as a diviner.
When he met the shipwrecked merchant, he asked one question: at what hour had the attack occurred?
With that, he took the merchant out in a small boat. At the site of the attack he traced invisible characters on the surface of the water and spoke words of binding. Then he returned to shore and told the merchant to hire men to watch the bay.
On the seventh day a ship came over the horizon and drifted in with no one at the oars and no wind in its sails. The pirates lay sprawled inside, insensible, as though drugged. The stolen cargo was untouched.
The villagers wanted to seize the men. Chitoku took custody of them himself, warned them never to work evil on those waters again, and let them go. They were never seen in the region afterward.
The tale closes with a note: this same Chitoku, at a time and place the text does not give, met Abe no Seimei.[1] Seimei perceived his shikigami — his spirit servants — and concealed them by superior technique. Chitoku could not get them back. The compiler adds that the failure came not from inferior ability but from ignorance of one particular art. In raw power, the implication runs, the provincial monk may have been Seimei’s equal.
The Harima connection. The province turns up repeatedly in onmyōji lore as a source of powerful folk practitioners. Ashiya Dōman — the sorcerer who became Seimei’s rival in later literature — is traditionally said to have come from there. The text appears to know the reputation and to treat Harima as a place where such figures are simply expected.
The intertextual link. Volume 24 of the Konjaku Monogatari-shū contains another story, Story 16, in which Seimei conceals a visiting monk’s shikigami. Story 19 identifies that monk as Chitoku, tying the two narratives together[1] and inviting the reader to hold the provincial master and the capital master side by side — neither wholly superior, each knowing something the other does not.
The question of justice. Releasing the pirates rather than handing them over is the strangest decision in the tale. The reason given is that killing them would only add to the weight of sin: a Buddhist ethical frame operating alongside the Chinese cosmology of onmyōdō, and a reminder that these practitioners drew on more than one tradition at once.
The piracy behind it. Fear of maritime raiders was ordinary in Heian Japan. Ki no Tsurayuki’s Tosa Nikki, written in 935 CE, records the constant anxiety of sea travelers about attack.[2] That an onmyōji might be asked to answer such a threat by ritual suggests how far these practitioners reached into daily life.
What stays with me is not the magic — the binding worked on the waves, the pirates drifting home in a stupor. It is the aftermath.
He could have handed them over. The villagers wanted to seize them, and justice by any conventional measure demanded it. He issued a warning and let them go instead.
The same restraint runs through a great many classical tales: the ghost who could destroy and departs, the deity who could punish and accepts an apology. Power exercised to its limit is not always power well used.
Perhaps that is the real difference between Chitoku and Seimei — not technique, not raw ability, but what each chose to do with what he knew.
Seimei built a legacy that echoed for a thousand years. Chitoku released some pirates on a beach in Harima and walked back into obscurity.
I am not sure which of them understood power better.
The readings in “Points of Interest” and “Final Thoughts” are KWAIDANOTE’s own.
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