方完藏數 To Complete the Count
金剛道：「前日觀音菩薩啟過如來，往來只在八日，方完藏數。今已經四日有餘，只怕八戒貪圖富貴，誤了期限。」金刚道：「前日观音菩萨启过如来，往来只在八日，方完藏数。今已经四日有余，只怕八戒贪图富贵，误了期限。」
逐句解 Line by line
The guardians said, “The other day the Bodhisattva Guanyin put it to the Tathagata that the journey out and back should take only eight days, so that the count of the canon should come out complete.”
Here is the arithmetic that has been driving the last two chapters, stated in one sentence. Guanyin worked out that fourteen years is five thousand and forty days, that the canon runs to five thousand and forty-eight scrolls, and that the journey was therefore eight days short of its own cargo. Eight days there and back makes the totals agree. 藏數 — the count of the 藏, the canon or basket of scripture. Its first character is read zàng in that sense, and it is the same character as the second in the Tang monk's own name. Read cáng it means to hide something away. 方完 — only then complete. The deadline is not about danger. It is about a sum.
“Four days and more have gone already. We only fear that Pigsy will covet wealth and rank and let the term slip.”
Half the time is spent and they are not home yet, and the guardians name the risk out loud: Pigsy. 貪圖富貴 — to covet wealth and rank. It is a standing four-character phrase and a real accusation. Pigsy has been offered a comfortable life roughly once a chapter for ninety chapters, has occasionally said yes, and everybody remembers. 期限, the term or deadline. Heaven's own escort is worried about the schedule, and about one pilgrim in particular.
The guardians explain the clock. Guanyin put it to the Buddha that the round trip should take eight days, so that the days of the journey would match the scrolls of the canon — and four of the eight are already gone.
It is worth pausing on how strange that is. The reason the pilgrims are being hurried through the last stretch of a fourteen-year pilgrimage is that a total needs to come out even. The same arithmetic dropped them in a river last chapter. Nothing in it has anything to do with them.
Then the guardians name their worry, and it is not demons or weather. It is that Pigsy will see something he wants and stop. That is the reputation he has earned over a hundred chapters, and heaven has read the file.