He was the fifth-generation descendant of the famous onmyouji Abe no Seimei, and as a talented onmyouji himself, he was highly valued by Fujiwara no Yorinaga and Kujo no Kanezane, both powerful men of the time, and later rose to the highest rank in the Bureau of Onmyou, Onmyou-no-kami.
In particular, he is said to have been unrivaled in the art of divination and even predicted the downfall of the Heike clan.
According to the "Genpei Seisui-ki (Record of the Rise and Fall of the Genji and Heike)", he was called "Sasu-no-miko (Medium of Pointing)" because he divined things as if pointing at his palm (a Japanese idiom that means 'obvious') and never missed his predictions, and it is also said that he never suffered a single injury, even when struck by lightning.
In the legend of Tamamo no Mae, he recognized the Nine-tailed Fox and performed the "Festival of Taizanfukun (a Taoist deity of the dead, the deification of a mountain (Mount Tai) where the dead gather, but it had also become the main deity of Onmyoudou)", which is reported to be a powerful incantation, to drive out the fox spirit.
The astronomical record he left behind, "Yasuchika Ason's Records", describes the approach of the moon and a comet on May 3, 1166, and is currently the oldest written record of a comet's approach in Japan.
[Ason, or Asomi, is one of eight hereditary titles given by the Emperor, it is the second most venerable, given to clans believed to have originated from Imperial princes.]
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