The chapter ends on the storyteller's conventional formula, promising to explain in the next installment "how that elder came to leave the temple." The hook is genuine: this comic-and-contemplative interlude at Baolin Monastery is the threshold to the next major adventure. In the chapters that follow, the murdered king of the Black-Rooster Kingdom will appear to Tripitaka in a dream in this very hall, setting in motion one of the pilgrimage's better-known episodes.

Structurally, Chapter 36 has done its work of transition. It opened with the party setting out again after the Yellow-Wind ordeal; carried them through the extended comedy of the inhospitable abbot and Wukong's forceful reversal of it; and closed with the moonlit discourse that lifts the whole episode from farce into the novel's recurring meditation on inner cultivation. The pilgrims are lodged, the night is still, and the stage is set — the phrase "how he came to leave the temple" pointing the reader onward.