雪獅向火 A Snow Lion Before the Fire
那獃子看到好處，忍不住口嘴流涎，心頭撞鹿，一時間骨軟筋麻，好便似雪獅子向火，不覺的都化去也。那呆子看到好处，忍不住口嘴流涎，心头撞鹿，一时间骨软筋麻，好便似雪狮子向火，不觉的都化去也。
逐句解 Line by line
When the Idiot had looked his fill at the best of it, he could not hold back the drool that ran from his mouth; a deer went butting in his breast, and in a moment his bones went soft and his sinews slack, so that he was for all the world like a lion of snow set before a fire, melting quite away before he knew it.
Forty characters, one sentence, and the images arrive in the right physiological order: mouth, heart, bones, dissolution. 心頭撞鹿 — a deer butting at the heart — is the standing everyday figure for a hammering, panicky pulse, near enough to the English "heart going like a trip-hammer." A lion of snow set before a fire, 雪獅子向火, is a Chan commonplace for a self that cannot survive contact with what it wants. 獃子 and 獅子 both take the ending zi; 好處 takes 處 as chù; 一時間 takes 間 as jiān; 不覺 takes 覺 as jué and keeps bù before it; 都 is dōu and 化 is huà.
Forty characters, one sentence, one segment — and it is the funniest thing in the chapter. The novel has just spent a hundred characters of formal verse on the queen's beauty; here is what that beauty actually did to the person looking at it. The drop from 秋波湛湛妖嬈態 to 忍不住口嘴流涎 is the whole comic mechanism, and it is done without a syllable of transition.
The images arrive in the right physiological order, too: first the mouth, then the heart, then the bones and sinews, then dissolution. 心頭撞鹿 — a deer butting at the heart — is an everyday phrase for panic, and putting it between the drool and the slack sinews turns the whole progression into something between arousal and terror, which is about right for Eight Rules.
The closing figure is the good one. A snow lion set in front of a fire keeps its shape exactly as long as nothing warm comes near it — a Chan commonplace for a self that cannot survive contact with what it wants. Handed to Eight Rules it becomes a fat joke about a pig going weak at the knees, and both readings run at once. The chapter is about to need the serious one: a thing that dissolves on contact is precisely what Tripitaka was describing when he spoke of losing his primal yang.