Pilgrim said: "It must be that those Daoists have besides some clever art of magic with which they lured the king;

Wukong is himself an old hand at these arts, and his instinct is professional skepticism. 那 is nà; 還 is hái; 甚 is shén.

if it were only summoning wind and calling rain, that too is but a petty heterodox trick — how could it move the sovereign's heart?"

傍門 is the "side gate" — the standard dismissive term for a heterodox or second-rate school, the tradesman's entrance of the spiritual world, now usually written 旁門. Rain-making, he says, is a side-gate trick, too slight to buy a throne. 傍 is páng, not the bàng that means beside. 都 is dōu; 得 in 動得 is the light de.

The monks said: "They can knead sand and smelt mercury, sit in meditation and preserve the spirit, point at water and make it oil, touch stone and turn it to gold;

摶砂煉汞, kneading sand and smelting mercury, is laboratory alchemy — the outer, chemical kind. 打坐存神, sitting in meditation and holding the spirit in place, is the inner kind, worked on the body itself. Naming both is a claim to the whole discipline. 為 is wéi.

and now they are raising the buildings of a Three-Pure Abbey, reading scriptures and doing repentance before Heaven and Earth day and night, praying that the king live ten thousand years unaging — and so they have quite bewitched the sovereign's heart."

And here is the real hold: not conjuring but liturgy. A 三清觀 — 觀 is guàn, a Daoist abbey, not the guān that means to observe — with scripture and penitence going day and night, all of it praying for a king who will not grow old. That is a service no rain-maker can match, because it is addressed to the one thing a king cannot buy. The abbey is named here for the first time, and it will be the scene of the chapter's last act. 興 in 興蓋 is xīng, to raise up, not the xìng of high spirits it carries elsewhere in the chapter; 看 is kàn; 不 is bù before 老.