復得回生 Three Days And Back To Life
少時，唐王身死，至三日復得回生。虧了魏徵，感崔判官改了文書，加王二十年壽。今要做水陸大會，故遣貧僧遠涉道途，詢求諸國，拜佛祖，取《大乘經》三藏，超度孽苦昇天也。」少时，唐王身死，至三日复得回生。亏了魏征，感崔判官改了文书，加王二十年寿。今要做水陆大会，故遣贫僧远涉道途，询求诸国，拜佛祖，取《大乘经》三藏，超度孽苦升天也。」
逐句解 Line by line
"In a little while the Tang king's body died, and on the third day he came back to life."
得 is dé again, here meaning 'got to' — he was permitted to return.
"Thanks to Wei Zheng, Judge Cui was moved to alter the document and add twenty years to my sovereign's span."
虧了 is everyday speech for 'thanks to', and it turns on the same character that carried Pilgrim's sarcastic 'however did you manage' below the city wall. Gratitude and jeer share a word.
"Now he would hold a Great Mass of Land and Water, and has therefore sent this poor monk to travel the long road, enquiring his way through the kingdoms, to do reverence to the Buddha and fetch the Three Baskets of the Greater Vehicle, that souls in torment may be delivered and rise to Heaven."
乘 is shèng in 大乘, the Greater Vehicle — the sealed chapters read the Buddhist sense that way and keep it apart from chéng, to ride or to seize an opening. And 三藏 here means the Three Baskets of scripture themselves, not the monk who is named after them.
The whole frame of the pilgrimage is compressed into one sentence. A mass for the dead requires scriptures, the scriptures are in the west, and so a monk is walking to India. Everything the reader has followed for sixty-seven chapters exists because a clerk in the underworld was persuaded to change a number.
Twenty years is a precise and rather small figure. Not immortality, not an unlimited reprieve — an administrative adjustment, granted as a favour between officers, and the whole pilgrimage is the receipt for it.