“May this merit adorn the Buddha's Pure Land,

These four lines are the Verse of Dedication, and they are not the novel's invention. They close Buddhist services across the Chinese-speaking world and have done for many centuries. The act the verse performs is huixiang: taking whatever good you have just accumulated and giving it away. And the reader has met the word twice — two blocks ago in Pigsy's mouth, where he meant only turn round and come back, and four chapters before this one, where somebody told him he cared nothing for it. 莊嚴 — to adorn, the word from the roll-call fifty lines back.

“above, repay the fourfold grace; below, relieve the suffering of the three evil paths;

四重恩 — the fourfold grace. Its second character is read chóng here, a layer or a kind, not zhòng, heavy. The four are traditionally the kindness of parents, of all living beings, of the ruler, and of the Three Jewels. 三途, the three evil paths — the hells, the hungry ghosts, the animals. The preface named them eighty lines ago, and the pilgrims' whole errand was described there as pulling beings out of them. Up and down in one line: repay above, relieve below.

“if there be any who see or hear, may they all raise the mind of enlightenment;

若有見聞者 — if there be any who see or hear. The verse turns and addresses the audience, and the audience is anyone within earshot. Which, in a printed book, is the reader. The last liturgy in the novel includes the person holding it. 菩提心 — bodhicitta, the resolve to become a buddha for the sake of everyone else.

“may we be born together in the Land of Utmost Bliss, and give this one body wholly in return.”

同生 — born together, all of us. The dedication ends by asking for company. 盡報此一身 — to give this one body entirely in repayment. It is the last line of the dedication and it offers back the only thing anybody has. 極樂國, the Land of Utmost Bliss, for the third time in this passage-run. The second character is lè, joy.

“All buddhas of the ten directions and the three times, all honoured bodhisattvas and mahasattvas — mahaprajnaparamita.”

Three lines of seven, and the last of them is not Chinese at all. 摩訶般若波羅密 is mahāprajñāpāramitā transcribed syllable by syllable — Great Wisdom Gone Beyond — and it is the closing formula of the Heart Sutra. Its middle two characters are read bō rě, the transcription band, not by the ordinary values either character carries. It is the very last thing the assembly says. And the speech marks close here, five hundred characters after they opened. The novel's final utterance is a Sanskrit phrase in Chinese sound-signs, spoken by everybody at once.