Sanzu River

Also Known As: 三途川, Sanzu no Kawa, the River of Three Crossings; formally Sōzuka 葬頭河, also called Mitsusegawa 三瀬川 and Watarigawa 渡り川; sanzu names the three evil paths of Buddhist scripture
Region/Culture: East Asia
Mythos: Japanese Mythology, Buddhist Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Mythological Places
Mythical Attributes: The river sorts the dead by their own conduct, opening a jewelled bridge to some, a shallow ford to others, and a channel of deep water, falling rock and one waiting serpent to the rest.
Role in Mythos: It is the border between this shore and the far one, crossed in the second week after death on the road to the courts of the Ten Kings.
Relation to Humans: Every Japanese Buddhist dead person is expected to cross it, which is why six coins go into the coffin and why an old woman waits on the bank to take the clothes of anyone who arrives without them. The living prepare for the crossing in advance, with cloth offered to that old woman, printed paper coins tucked in beside the body, and stones piled on riverbanks for children who went ahead of their parents.

Six copper coins go into the coffin. Not treasure, not ornament, just small change laid beside a body that has no further use for money in this world. The dead have a river to cross, and in Japan nobody has ever expected the crossing to be free.

The river is the Sanzu, and it runs between this shore and the other one. Its formal name in the scriptures is Sōzuka, though people have called it the Mitsusegawa and simply the Crossing River for as long as anyone has written it down. Most of what the tradition believes about it comes from a single Japanese text of the twelfth century, the Jizō jūō kyō, built out of an older Chinese scripture concerning ten judges who process the dead like a court processes a docket. One line of that text has done more work than the rest of it combined. There are three ways over, it says: the mountain-water shallows, the deep pool, the bridge.

Which one you get is not a choice. The good walk across a bridge of gold, silver and the seven treasures, dry-shod, the way a person crosses a river in a well-ordered country. Those carrying lighter offences wade the shallows, water dragging at the legs, footing uncertain on stones that shift. Everyone else is sent to the deep crossing, where the water is high and quick and rocks come tumbling from upstream to break whoever is in the way. Being broken settles nothing. The body knits back together, because it is already dead and death is not available as an exit, and then the rocks come round again. Something long is said to lie on the riverbed down there, and it is not waiting for the virtuous.

The name itself carries an older meaning that the popular story has mostly buried. In Buddhist scripture sanzu means the three evil paths, the destinies of hell, of hungry ghosts and of beasts, and the phrase turns up in that sense centuries before anyone in Japan was counting fords. The reading everyone now uses, three crossings for three grades of sinner, is a later gloss laid over the original. It is a good example of how the afterlife gets furnished: a phrase arrives from abroad, someone misreads it productively, and within a few generations the misreading has a riverbank, a toll and a resident staff.

That staff is a pair of elderly ogres. Datsueba, the clothes-snatching old woman, sits at the water and strips the newly arrived. Her counterpart Ken’eō, the clothes-hanging old man, carries the sodden bundle to a huge tree on the bank, the eryōju, and hangs it over a branch. The branch dips. How far it dips is the measurement, and the measurement is the sentence. Anyone who turns up without the six coins pays in clothing instead, which is the whole point of the coins.

Datsueba’s first appearance in Japanese writing is a small one. In an eleventh-century collection of Lotus Sutra miracle tales, a priest named Renshū dies suddenly and finds himself at the river, where the old woman reaches for his robe. Divine boys appear and take him out of her hands, and he wakes up alive, credited to his devotion to the sutra. She is barely a character in that story. Within two hundred years she was standing in the middle of hell paintings, and by the late Edo period she had her own halls, her own images and a following of women who brought her cloth.

The crossing happens on a schedule. The dead move through ten courts, one every seven days at first, and the river lies between the first king’s tribunal and the second, so the water is put behind the newly dead in their second week. Downstream of the ford, on a stretch of stony ground called the Sai no Kawara, are the children who died before their parents. They pile pebbles into little towers, one on another, as an offering for the parents they wounded by dying first. Demons come and kick the towers flat. The children start again. The stones click and the work never finishes, and in ordinary Japanese speech Sai no Kawara has come to mean any labour that cannot be completed. Jizō rescues them in the end. None of that is canonical doctrine, and the tradition is fairly relaxed about admitting so.

Heian courtiers had their own variations. There was a belief in the tenth century that a woman would be carried over the water on the back of the first man she had slept with, an idea the author of the Kagerō Nikki thought worth a poem. Ono no Takamura, writing in grief, wished his tears would fall as rain hard enough to raise the Crossing River, so that whoever had gone over might be turned back.

The Sanzu also exists as wet geography. At Osorezan in Aomori, a stream leaves the sulphurous blue of Lake Usori and is called the Sanzu River outright; a red arched bridge goes over it, the ground beyond smells of rotten eggs and steams through cracks, and pilgrims stack stones there for the dead. In Kanra in Gunma there is an ordinary little river with the same name, crossed by a road bridge called the Sanzubashi, with a small hall beside it holding an image of Datsueba. Local record has it under that name by 1820.

What the river does, it does without argument. It is a judgement delivered by terrain rather than by a bench, and it happens before any of the ten kings has spoken a word. What it cannot do is refuse an offering. Six mon in the coffin buys the bridge, and the tradition is careful to insist this is not a bribe but a proof of remorse; cloth given to Datsueba during life means she leaves your clothes alone in death; devotion pulled Renshū back off the bank entirely; and Jizō walks the children over. The one-mon coin has not been legal tender for a very long time, so what goes into the coffin now is a slip of paper with six coins printed on it. The toll is still paid.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Sanzu River?

The Sanzu River is the river the dead cross in Japanese Buddhist tradition, dividing the world of the living from the world beyond. Its name means the River of Three Crossings, and souls pass over it in the second week after death on their way to be judged by the Ten Kings. It fills roughly the role that the Styx fills in Greek myth.

What are the three crossings of the Sanzu River?

They are a bridge, a shallow ford and a deep channel, assigned according to the weight of a person’s offences. The virtuous cross a bridge of gold, silver and the seven treasures; those with lighter sins wade a shallow reach called the mountain-water crossing; the worst are driven into deep, fast water where falling rock breaks them and a great serpent waits on the bottom.

Why are six coins placed in a Japanese coffin?

The six coins, called rokumonsen, are the toll for crossing the Sanzu River. Anyone arriving without them has their clothing taken instead. By the Edo period the coins were understood as an offering proving remorse rather than a bribe, and since one-mon coins are long out of circulation, printed paper versions are buried today.

Who waits at the Sanzu River?

An elderly pair of ogres works the riverbank. Datsueba strips the clothes from the newly dead, and her counterpart Ken’eō hangs the wet garments on a great tree called the eryōju, reading the bend of the branch as a measure of sin. Datsueba later became a popular object of worship in her own right, with her own halls and images.

Where is the Sanzu River in Japan?

Several real rivers carry the name. The best known is at Osorezan on the Shimokita Peninsula in Aomori, where a stream running out of Lake Usori is called the Sanzu River and crossed by a red arched bridge. Another flows at Kanra in Gunma, under a bridge named the Sanzubashi, with a small hall for Datsueba standing beside it.