穿山甲 He Became A Pangolin
好大聖，念個咒語，搖身一變，變做個穿山甲，又名鯪鯉鱗。真個是：好大圣，念个咒语，摇身一变，变做个穿山甲，又名鲮鲤鳞。真个是：
逐句解 Line by line
Splendid Great Sage! He spoke a spell, gave himself a shake, and turned into a pangolin, otherwise called a scaly anteater.
穿山甲 means pierce-mountain-armour, which is as good a description of a pangolin as any language has managed: an animal in overlapping scales that digs through hard ground. 鯪鯉鱗 is its other old name, carrying 鯉, carp — the scales looked like a fish's. Of the seventy-two transformations available to him, he picks the one that digs.
And truly:
The verse switch, three characters. What follows is a natural-history note in rhapsody form.
Four iron claws, boring through hills and crushing rock as though beating powder;
鑽 is zuān here, the verb — to bore, to burrow. 撾 is to beat or pound, so 撾粉 is pounding grain into flour: rock reduced to the consistency of a kitchen ingredient.
A whole body of scaled armour, splitting ridges and piercing crags as though slicing scallions.
The second kitchen simile in two lines — 切蔥, slicing spring onions. Chinese descriptive verse reaches for the domestic to convey ease, and the effect here is comic rather than grand: a mountain going through this animal like a vegetable through a knife.
Of every shape available to him, Pilgrim picks a pangolin, and it is exactly right. The problem is a light that covers a fixed area and cannot be broken, punched or out-flown. The solution is not to be stronger. It is to be an animal that goes under things.
The pangolin is also a real creature with a real place in Chinese pharmacy, and the verse is about to say so outright. 穿山甲 — pierce-mountain-armour — has been the drug name for its scales for centuries, which is why the closing couplet mentions medicine at all. The book is showing off a piece of ordinary knowledge, the way it does with alchemy and weights and tea.
And the similes are both from a kitchen: pounding flour, slicing onions. Rock and mountain ridges rendered as food preparation. It is the same instinct that made the silk canopy a banquet awning and the poison a matter of scales and dates — this chapter keeps insisting that the terrible things in it are domestic.