The abduction takes a single sentence, and the speed of it is the point. All the elaborate machinery of the preceding passages — the cries, the disguise, the sob-story, the weighing, the smashing — resolves under cover of the whirlwind into the one outcome the demon wanted from the start: the Master seized and carried off, without track or shadow, to somewhere nobody can name. Even Wukong, who alone understood the wind for what it was and sprang at once to give chase, is too late.

This is the chapter's structural climax and its title fulfilled. The Chan-mind of 嬰兒戲化禪心亂 is Tripitaka, and he has now been not merely disturbed but removed, the whole purpose of the pilgrimage suspended at a stroke. The second line of the title couplet, 猿馬刀圭木母空, names the consequence in the language of the poem a few passages back: with the Master gone, the compound self that poem had diagrammed — mind-monkey, will-horse, wood-mother and the rest — is left 空, emptied out, its work undone. The chapter reaches its low point here. What follows is the aftermath: the disciples picking themselves up in the stilled air, discovering the Master gone, and taking the first steps of a search that will end at the door of the Fire-Cloud Cave.