A princess is executed for refusing to marry, and her soul, waking as from a dream on a cloud, cannot find her body. "Miao Shan's soul, which remained unhurt," is met by a shining youth in blue and led down into the eighteen hells — not as a prisoner but as an honored guest, for the ten gods of the lower regions have heard of her. They make a strange request: they have learned that "when you recite your prayers" then "all evil disappears as if by magic", and they wish to hear her pray. She consents on one condition, that every condemned soul be unchained to listen. Then "Miao Shan began her prayers", and no sooner had she finished than "Hell was" "suddenly transformed into a paradise of joy," the instruments of torture turning to lotus-flowers. This is the motif Thompson filed as the soul that prays.

The witness is the tenth chapter of Myths & Legends of China (a compilation of Chinese myth published in 1922), which tells how the girl Miao Shan became Kuan Yin, the Goddess of Mercy. The prayer here is offered by no living mouth: the body lies preserved under a pine-tree far above, a magic pill in its lips "to arrest decay", while it is the disembodied soul, carried through the underworld, that does the praying. The keeper of the Register of the Dead is forced to complain to the King of Hell that there is no longer any pain in his kingdom — that if this saint is not sent back to earth, "there will no longer be any Hell, but only a Heaven." So the prayer of one soul threatens to abolish damnation itself, and the King, to keep the cosmic ledger balanced, must return her over the Styx-bridge to her waiting flesh.

Thompson set beside this Chinese witness a Jewish authority, cited from Neuman, which waits unread; only the tale of Miao Shan is wired to served text today. It is enough to raise the question the motif turns on. If a soul can pray while it is separated from its body — pray so well that Hell empties — then where, in this telling, does the praying self actually live: in the body that lies still, or in the thing that has left it?