The chapter ends on the storyteller's conventional formula, promising to explain next time 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 appears to Tripitaka in a dream in this very hall, and the pilgrims are drawn into one of the pilgrimage's best-known episodes. Chapter 37's own title names the child at the centre of it — the king's son, still on the throne his father lost.

Structurally, Chapter 36 has done its work of transition. It opened with the party setting out again after the Level-Top Mountain ordeal and the recovery of Lord Lao's treasures; it carried them through the extended comedy of the inhospitable abbot and Wukong's forceful reversal of it; and it closed with the moonlit discourse that lifts the whole episode out of farce and into the novel's recurring subject, the cultivation of the self. The pilgrims are lodged, the night is still, and the phrase about leaving the temple points the reader onward.