The Great Sage heard him, and only then propped the hook aside with his iron rod and said, "I had meant to make an end of you root and branch, but you have committed no crime after all; and secondly, out of regard for your elder brother the Bull Demon King.

聽得 takes 得 as dé; 斬盡 takes 盡 as jìn; 看…情上 takes 看 as kàn, in the sense out of regard for. The two grounds of clemency are legal and familial, and neither one is compassion.

The first time I came, I was hooked down twice and got no water.

未得 takes 得 as dé. He states the record accurately, which the gatekeeper's flattering version a few passages back did not.

This time I came, it was a stratagem to lure the tiger from the mountain: I coaxed you out to fight, and set my junior brother to fetch the water instead.

調虎離山 — lure the tiger off his mountain — is a stratagem still in daily use, and it is exactly what Wukong has just done: draw the defender away from what he is defending. 調 here is diào, to summon away, as against the tiáo, to blend, of 調和 in the poem a few segments on. 卻著 takes 著 as zhuó, sending somebody off to do a job.

If Old Sun chose to bring out his real powers against you, never mind one True Immortal As-You-Will — if there were several more of you, I would have beaten them all to death.

甚麼 takes 甚 as shén. The boast is at least partly true, and it is offered as the reason for sparing him rather than as a threat.

But it is better to spare a life than to take one, so I will let you off and leave you a few years to live.

打死不如放生 — better to spare a life than take one — is a Buddhist commonplace, and it is being produced by a mouth that has spent the whole chapter threatening to beat people to death. 教 is jiào, to let or make somebody do a thing.

Hereafter, if any come for water, you are on no account to squeeze them for it."

勒掯 is to squeeze or extort, a Yuan and Ming vernacular pairing, and it takes 勒 as lè — the same reading as reining in a horse earlier in the chapter, not lēi. This clause is the chapter's actual settlement. Not the demon's death: the reopening of the spring.

The demon immortal had no sense of what was good for him: he made a feint, and came at once for the foot with his hook.

演一演 is to make a show or a feint. Having just been given his life and an instruction, he attacks — which is what licenses everything in the next three segments.

The Great Sage dodged past the hook-head, ran forward and shouted, "Don't run!"

喝聲 takes 喝 as hè, a shout — the reading it carries at every site in this chapter but one.

The demon immortal was caught off guard, was shoved sprawling, and could not struggle up.

蹼辣 imitates a heavy sprawling fall — the noise of a man going down hard — and keeps its ordinary reading.

The Great Sage seized the as-you-will hook from him and broke it in two; then gathering it up he wrenched again, and wrenched it into four pieces.

折為兩段 takes 折 as zhé, broken into pieces, against the shé of 打折 in the previous passage, where the same character was a limb snapped by a blow. 折為 takes 為 as wéi.

He flung it on the ground and said, "You cursed beast! Do you dare be insolent again?"

Destroying the weapon rather than the man is the exact measure of the settlement. The hook was the instrument of the monopoly, and it is the hook that goes.

The demon immortal shook and trembled, and swallowed the humiliation without a word.

忍辱 is, in Buddhist usage, kshanti — the perfection of patient endurance under insult, one of the six virtues a bodhisattva cultivates. Applied here to a beaten extortionist swallowing his humiliation, it is not a compliment.

The Great Sage laughed aloud and rose upon his cloud. There is a poem in witness of it. The poem runs:

為證 takes 為 as wéi. 有詩為證，詩曰 — there is a poem in witness of it, and the poem runs — is the most formal of all this novel's cues for verse, reserved for moments where the storyteller wants to hand down a judgement.

If the true lead is to be smelted, true water is required; the true water blends it, and the true mercury goes dry.

調和 takes 調 as tiáo, to blend, against the diào of 調虎離山 eleven segments back. 汞乾 takes 乾 as gān, dry, not the qián of the trigram. 真鉛 and 真汞 are the lead and mercury of internal alchemy — stages in a meditative process, not metals in a crucible.

True mercury and true lead, with no mother-breath in them: the numinous cinnabar, the numinous drug — that is the immortal's elixir.

無母氣 denies any generative principle to the true ingredients. The line is doctrinal and, placed exactly here, polemical: the elixir is made without conception.

The infant had knit itself a semblance of a fetus for nothing; the Earth Mother applied her work, and it cost no great trouble.

嬰兒 takes 兒 as ér, child. In internal alchemy 嬰兒 is the immortal embryo the adept gestates within himself, and 土母 is the Earth Mother, the mediating agent that reconciles the other two — the 黃婆 of this chapter's own title, and, among the five pilgrims, Sha Monk.

Side-doors overthrown, the orthodox teaching upheld; the Mind-Lord well pleased, and the smile returns.

推倒 takes 倒 as dǎo; 笑容還 takes 還 as huán, to return. 旁門 are the side-gates of the Way, the heterodox schools; 心君, the Mind-Lord, is Wukong under the standing allegorical name this novel gives him, the 心猿 or Mind-Monkey.