The storyteller's closing formula, and for once it is not a tease but an accurate statement of where things stand. 畢竟不知如何分辨 — in the end there is no knowing how they are to be told apart — is true of every character in the chapter and, at this point, of the reader as well.

The chapter has withheld the one piece of evidence that would settle it. We know the figure on the road cannot be Wukong, because we watched the Bodhisattva keep him at Potalaka; but that is knowledge about a schedule, not about the two bodies. Nothing in fifty-five hundred graphs has distinguished them by any quality of their own except a single refusal to return a blow.