封為玉華王 Enfeoffed as Prince of Yuhua
那老者聞言，口稱：「有道禪師，我這敝處乃天竺國下郡，地名玉華縣。縣中城主，就是天竺皇帝之宗室，封為玉華王。那老者闻言，口称：「有道禅师，我这敝处乃天竺国下郡，地名玉华县。县中城主，就是天竺皇帝之宗室，封为玉华王。
逐句解 Line by line
The old man heard this and said, "Chan master of the Way, this humble place of ours is a subordinate district of India, and it is called Yuhua County.
敝處, my shabby place, is the mirror image of the precious region Tripitaka just used — you deflate your own and inflate theirs. The news is the important part: they have reached 天竺國, India, which is the destination the whole pilgrimage has been walking towards for eighty-seven chapters. It is delivered flatly, by a farmer, as an aside. 玉華 is Jade Splendour, and the chapter calls the place a county, though the two chapters that follow will call it a prefecture instead.
The lord of the county town is a member of the imperial clan of India, enfeoffed as Prince of Yuhua.
This one sentence settles what the man is, and it is worth being exact about it. 宗室 means the imperial clan — the emperor's own kin. 封 is to enfeoff, to grant a territory and a title to a relative, and 為 is read wéi here in its sense of "as", not the wèi that means for the sake of. So India has an emperor somewhere else, and this man is a royal kinsman holding a district in his gift. He is a prince, not a king, and the text keeps that distinction scrupulously.
The great arrival of the pilgrimage happens here, in a thicket, from a man in palm-fibre sandals, and nobody reacts at all. They have reached India. Tripitaka does not fall to his knees; the conversation simply continues.
That flatness is deliberate and it is one of the novel's best jokes. The Buddha's mountain is still a long way off, and reaching India turns out to mean reaching the outermost provincial county of India, where the local lord is a distant cousin of the emperor and the rice is cheap.
The rank matters more than it might seem. Everything the pilgrims do for the rest of this chapter — how they are greeted, what they are called, who bows to whom — follows from this man being a prince of the blood with an appanage rather than a monarch, and the novel gets every one of those details right.