陰功高疊 Hidden Merit Piled High
如此盤桓，將有個月，才得離城。又有傳下影神，立起牌位，頂禮焚香供養。這才是：如此盘桓，将有个月，才得离城。又有传下影神，立起牌位，顶礼焚香供养。这才是：
逐句解 Line by line
They were kept hanging about like this for the best part of a month before they managed to get away from the city.
盤桓, to linger or be detained, is faintly rueful. A month is a long delay on a journey that has already taken fourteen years, and the novel makes it a month of dinners.
There were also spirit-portraits handed down and memorial tablets set up, and people bowed to them and burned incense and made offerings.
影神, shadow-spirits, are painted likenesses used for veneration; 牌位 are the wooden tablets a Chinese family keeps for its ancestors. So the four pilgrims end the chapter installed on household altars in a foreign kingdom — receiving exactly the seasonal offerings the king tried to buy Tripitaka's heart with, now given freely and by the people instead. 供養 takes gòng, the noun-derived reading — things set out as an offering.
And this was truly a case of:
The tag for the chapter's closing couplet. Three characters.
Hidden merit piled high, the debt heavy as a mountain: / brought back to life, thousands upon thousands of thousands of people.
陰功, hidden merit, closes the loop with Wukong's one piece of doctrine a few passages back — build up more hidden merit. The chapter states the principle in his mouth and then measures it in the couplet. 千千萬萬 is the same uncountable doubling the poem used of the willows in the grove: thousands upon tens of thousands. The actual figure was one thousand one hundred and eleven, and the couplet is not counting — it is reckoning the descendants.
The couplet closes the chapter on the word Wukong used for his own advice to the king. Hidden merit is good done where nobody is watching and no credit is recorded — and the whole city is at this moment recording it on tablets, which is a contradiction the novel seems perfectly happy with.
The arithmetic in the second line is the point. Eleven hundred children saved is a fixed number; thousands upon thousands is what those children become. It is the only moment in two chapters when anyone counts forward instead of back.