As the story goes, Bassui's mother had a vision that the child she was carrying would one day become a fiend who would slay both his parents. His mother abandoned him at birth in a field where a family servant secretly rescued and reared him. I think I heard somewhere that the mother, no doubt, arranged for the servant to be down there to to rescue the baby. When he was seven years old, at a memorial service for his father, he asked suddenly the officiating monk, for whom are these offerings of rice and cakes and fruit? This is, by the way, not an uncommon question in introductory workshops. People will say, "Wait, those flowers and fruit or vegetable on the altar, what's with that? And what I say if I sometimes will give an explanation, sometimes not, I'll say, "They're just concrete ways, physical concrete ways of expressing respect and gratitude to the Buddha which means our own Buddha nature, honoring our own Buddha nature." It's one thing to just say it, honoring our Buddha nature in words or thoughts. It's another thing to actually arrange these offerings on the altar. It's very Zen, maybe it's very Asian, to concretize one's feelings that way. So this kid Bassui says, who are those offerings of rice and cakes and fruit for? And the priest said, well for your father, of course. And then young Bassui said, but father has no shape or body now. So how can you eat them? And the priest said though he has no visible body, his soul will receive these offerings. And never mind that there's no soul in Buddhism. But let's let that go. If there is such a thing as a soul, the child pressed on, I must have one in my body. What is it like? To be sure, Roshi Kapleau writes, to be sure these are not unusual questions from a thoughtful sensitive child of seven. For Bassui, however, they were only the beginning of an intense, unremitting self inquiry, which was to continue well into manhood. Until, in fact, he had achieved full enlightenment. Even he says, even during his play with other children, he was never free of these uncertainties, these doubts as to the existence of a soul. And this concern of his with soul led him to think about hell. In an agony of fear, he would exclaim, how awful to be consumed by the flames of hell. Tears would well up. When he was 10, he was often awakened by brilliant flashes of light which filled his room, followed by an all enveloping darkness. Anxiously he sought for some explanation of these weird occurrences. But the replies that came didn't help. Leave it to others to diagnose that, those flashes of light filled by darkness. He kept questioning himself. If after death, the soul suffers the agonies of hell or enjoys the delights of paradise, what is the nature of his soul? But if there is no soul, what is it within me, which this very moment is seeing and hearing? There we go. Now we get squarely into Zen's wheelhouse, no soul, but then what is it? That is seen right now, hearing these words, hearing the sound of the geese?