"I am afraid that if he raises an army and leads out his host, the common people will be alarmed and hurt a second time and Your Majesty frightened. I would sooner go and meet him halfway, take him up there in the middle air, and fetch the sage queen back."

興 is xīng, to raise or set in motion — not the xìng of high spirits. 諕 is xià, to frighten. 迎他一迎 puts the verb on both sides of its own measure, a vernacular pattern that makes an action sound brief and offhand: go and give him a bit of a meeting. Wukong uses the same shape three more times in this chapter.

"Only I do not know which quarter to make for."

那 is nǎ here — which direction — and not the nà that points at something. The edition writes both with the same character, and only the question mark and the sense tell them apart.

"How far is it from here to that mountain cave of his?"

And one sentence later it is nà again, pointing at a cave already mentioned. Two occurrences, two readings, no change on the page. 多少遠近 asks for a distance by naming both its extremes at once, far-and-near, the way English asks how big by saying what size.