走了傍門 Gone Off By A Side Door
行者道：「悟淨說得有理。師父，你且睡覺，明日等老孫同你進朝，看國丈的好歹。如若是人，只恐他走了傍門，不知正道，徒以採藥為真，待老孫將先天之要旨，化他皈正；行者道：「悟净说得有理。师父，你且睡觉，明日等老孙同你进朝，看国丈的好歹。如若是人，只恐他走了傍门，不知正道，徒以采药为真，待老孙将先天之要旨，化他皈正；
逐句解 Line by line
Pilgrim said, "Wujing speaks with reason.
說得有理 — said with sense in it. 得 is the reduced de, hooking the verb to the judgement on it. Wukong uses Sha Monk's religious name, Wujing, which he does when he is taking him seriously.
"Master, go to sleep. Tomorrow let old Monkey go with you into court and see whether this Royal Father-in-Law is good or bad.
覺 is jiào again, the sleeping one — the second of the chapter's two. 好歹 hǎo dǎi is a single word made of its own opposites, good-and-bad, meaning which of the two something turns out to be.
"If he is a man, I only fear he has gone off by a side door and does not know the true way, and takes the gathering of drugs for the real thing; then let old Monkey bring him round to the right path with the essentials of the primal teaching.
傍 is páng, at the side — not the bàng that means to lean on something. 傍門, the side door, is the standing term for a heterodox path: the practices that look like the real discipline and lead nowhere. 為 is wéi, takes X AS Y. 先天 xiān tiān is "prior to heaven" — the original state before the world was differentiated, and the goal of serious inner alchemy as against the swallowing of compounds.
Wukong's first response to the problem is not to fight anybody. It is to offer to teach. If the Royal Father-in-Law is a human being who has taken a wrong turning, the Great Sage proposes to sit him down and explain where he went wrong.
The distinction he draws is a real one and the novel takes it seriously throughout. There is an inner alchemy that works on the practitioner's own nature and an outer one that gathers and swallows substances, and this book consistently treats the first as the discipline and the second as the side door. The king's whole tragedy is that he has bought the second.
It is also worth noticing that Wukong — who was himself a Daoist adept long before he was a Buddhist pilgrim, and who stole and ate the elixir of immortality in the first ten chapters of this book — is the one qualified to make the distinction. He has done both.