And this is just what is meant:

The cue, and the poem it introduces is a summary of the whole book delivered while its heroes are still visible going up.

The holy monk laboured to fetch the scripture-rolls, and went the round of the western regions fourteen years.

十四年 — fourteen years again, for the third time in this chapter. The Tang monk gave it as fourteen rounds of cold and heat; the emperor's preface printed it where the real document says seventeen; now the closing poem says it plainly. The novel has been quietly making its own number stick. 努力 — put out effort. It is now the ordinary modern word for work hard, and it is doing plain work here.

He went bitterly through the stages of the road and met calamity; he passed many hills and rivers and suffered setbacks.

患難 — trouble and calamity. Its second character is read nàn, an ordeal undergone, not nán, difficult. It is the same word the ledger of eighty ordeals was written in last chapter, and the last time this chapter uses it. 迍邅 — a rare pair meaning to stumble and be held up, a run of bad going. Both characters are almost unused outside it.

The work complete at eight nines, nine more were added; the practice full at three thousand, and on to the great thousand.

八九還加九 — eight nines, and nine more added. That is seventy-two plus nine, which is eighty-one. The chapter has still never written the number down, and this is the third way it has been implied. 還 here is hái, further, in addition — not the huán of the preface eight passages ago, where it meant restored. Same character, two words, one chapter. 三千 and 大千 are Buddhist cosmology: a thousand worlds make a small chiliocosm, and a thousand of those a great one.

The wondrous writings of the great awakening came back to the upper country, and to this day are handed down for ever in the eastern land.

至今 — to this day. The novel steps out of its story and speaks to a reader in the real world, which it does only a handful of times in a hundred chapters and always about something you could go and check. And what it claims is checkable and true. The scriptures did come back, they were translated, and they were still being read when this was printed in 1592. The poem is saying: whatever you have just watched, the books are here. 上國 — the upper country, meaning China. Even the closing poem cannot help ranking the two ends of the road.