魚籃之像 The Fish-Basket Form
那菩薩見他們認得元光，即踏祥雲，起在半空，現了真像，原來是魚籃之像。行者趕到空中，拜告道：「菩薩，恕弟子失迎之罪。我等努力救師，不知菩薩下降。今遇魔難難收，萬望菩薩搭救搭救。」菩薩道：「這妖精十分利害。他那三股叉是生成的兩隻鉗腳。扎人痛者，是尾上一個鉤子，喚做倒馬毒。本身是個蝎子精。那菩萨见他们认得元光，即踏祥云，起在半空，现了真像，原来是鱼篮之像。行者赶到空中，拜告道：「菩萨，恕弟子失迎之罪。我等努力救师，不知菩萨下降。今遇魔难难收，万望菩萨搭救搭救。」菩萨道：「这妖精十分利害。他那三股叉是生成的两只钳脚。扎人痛者，是尾上一个钩子，唤做倒马毒。本身是个蝎子精。
逐句解 Line by line
Seeing that they had recognized her primal radiance, the Bodhisattva trod upon her auspicious cloud, rose into mid-air, and revealed her true likeness — which proved to be the likeness of the Fish Basket.
元光 is the primal radiance, the light proper to a god. 魚籃 names one of the standard forms Guanyin takes in popular art — see the commentary, because the choice is loaded.
Pilgrim hurried up into the air and made his petition: “Bodhisattva, forgive your disciple the offence of failing to meet you. We were labouring to save our master and did not know that you had come down.
下降 takes 降 as jiàng, to come down — against the xiáng, to subdue, which turns up later in this same conversation. 弟子 takes 子 as the full zǐ. 空中 takes the locative zhōng.
“Now we have met with a demon-calamity that will not be brought to an end. We beg the Bodhisattva, of all things, to rescue us, to rescue us.”
魔難難收 puts both readings of 難 side by side in four characters: 魔難 is nàn, a calamity, and 難收 is nán, hard to wind up. 搭救搭救 doubles the verb in pleading — "help us, do help us".
The Bodhisattva said, “This fiend is formidable indeed. That three-pronged trident of hers is a pair of pincer-claws grown upon her.
Here is the revelation, and its hinge is two characters: 生成的, grown on her — not made, not carried. The trident was never a weapon. 十分 takes 分 as fēn.
“What stabs and gives the pain is a hook upon her tail, and it is called the horse-felling poison.
倒馬毒 takes 倒 as dǎo, agreeing with the naming of the weapon when it was first used. 鉤子 takes the light zi.
“In her own body she is a scorpion spirit.”
蝎子 takes the light zi. Seven characters — and the identification the chapter has been withholding for four thousand.
The form she takes when the disguise drops is worth a moment. 魚籃觀音, the Guanyin of the Fish Basket, is a standard figure of popular art, and the legend usually attached to her is that of a beautiful woman who offered to marry whichever suitor could first learn a scripture by heart, and who turned out after the wedding to have been a Bodhisattva all along. Whether the novel intends the echo it does not say. But of all the shapes available to her, the one she takes in a chapter about a woman using marriage against a monk is the one in which she herself once used marriage on behalf of scripture.
Her account of the scorpion answers the question the pilgrims have failed to answer for four thousand characters, and it answers it with anatomy. The trident is not a weapon she carries but 生成的兩隻鉗腳, a pair of claws that grew on her; the thing that stabs is a hook on her tail. This is why the fight could not be won by fighting. Pilgrim kept saying 不知是甚兵器 — there was no telling what weapon it was — and the reason is that there was no weapon at all.
The identification itself runs to seven characters and is entirely flat: 本身是個蝎子精, in her own body she is a scorpion spirit. The novel spends no rhetoric on it whatever. Everything the reader has watched — the lute-shaped cave, the poison, the pincers, the sting held back until the visible weapons were mastered — resolves into one ordinary creature, and the flatness makes the preceding mystery feel, in retrospect, entirely fair.