降妖聚會 The Closing Couplet
正是：正是：
逐句解 Line by line
Truly it was:
The tag that opens the closing couplet, and the chapter's third and last showpiece.
Parted midway, the Five Phases fell into disorder; / the demon subdued and the gathering rejoined, the Primal Brightness is made whole.
五行 is the Five Phases, the scheme the novel maps onto the five members of the pilgrim band. 降妖 takes xiáng, to subdue — against the jiàng of 降蓮臺 and 降天花 earlier in this same chapter, where it means to come down or send down. 中道 takes zhōng; 分離 takes fēn.
The spirit returns to the heart's dwelling, and Chan is at last settled; / the six consciousnesses dispelled and subdued, the elixir forms of itself.
心舍 takes shè, the heart's dwelling, where the automatic reading gives shě. 六識 is the six kinds of awareness of Buddhist psychology — eye, ear, nose, tongue, body, mind. 祛降 takes xiáng again, paired with 祛, to drive out.
The closing couplet reads the whole chapter as inner alchemy, which is the same reading the poem gave earlier. 中道分離亂五行 — parted midway, the Five Phases in disorder — treats the quarrel not as an event in a plot but as a disturbance in the practitioner's own constitution, the five members of the pilgrim band standing for the five phases.
元明, the Primal Brightness, and 丹, the elixir, come from the inner-alchemy tradition, and 六識祛降 brings in the six kinds of awareness from Buddhist psychology in the same breath. The novel mixes the two vocabularies as a matter of course, and the chapter's resolution is stated in both at once: the demon subdued, the company reunited, the spirit back in its own house.
神歸心舍禪方定 is the line that names what the two minds were. The spirit had left its own dwelling, and Chan could not settle while it was out. Read that way the Six-Eared Macaque was never an intruder at all, and 至今絕此一種 — the kind extinct from that day — becomes a statement about a practitioner rather than about a species.