托塔天王 Daughter To The Pagoda King
逐句解 Line by line
One full meal of incense flowers and candles, and the Tathagata sent word down to the courts of heaven.
天曹 are the celestial bureaus, the offices of heaven's administration. She ate the Buddha's own offerings, and the consequence was a memorandum.
Beloved daughter of the Pagoda-Bearing Heavenly King, sworn sister of the Prince Nezha.
子 takes the literary zǐ in the prince's title, a compound of high register — against the everyday zi the same character takes in words like idiot. 托塔天王 is Li Jing, who carries a pagoda; 哪吒 is his son, the boy-general of Chinese myth.
She is not the bird that would fill the sea, nor the great turtle that bears the mountains.
Two mythical creatures for contrast: the bird is the drowned princess who carried pebbles to fill the ocean, and the turtle holds up the isles of the immortals. The verse is telling us what she is not before it tells us what she is.
Her pedigree turns out to be extraordinary, and the novel drops it in the middle of a monster-description as though it were an ordinary detail.
She stole the Buddha's offerings, was arrested, and was then adopted as a daughter by the Heavenly King and made sister to Nezha. That adoption is why she has protection, and it is why the arc that follows cannot simply be settled with a cudgel.
The two negative comparisons are doing what riddles do — narrowing the field while withholding the answer. Not a bird, not a turtle. The last line of the verse will finally say it.