Ṛg Veda 4.58.2: Four Horns, Three Feet
"Four are the horns; three are his feet; two his heads; seven his hands. Bound in three places, the bull bellows aloud. The great god has entered into mortals."
Note the locator carefully: this is 4.58.2, in the hymn to ghṛta. It is frequently miscited as 4.58.3. A citation platform that cannot get its own worked example right has no business grading anyone else's.
1. The first reading is not disputed. The ādhibhautika register (§5.2) gives the sacrificial reading and the method affirms it. Nothing here requires it to be false.
2. The second reading is attested from the highest authority in its own field. Patañjali opens the Mahābhāṣya — the foundational text of Sanskrit grammatical science — by applying this verse to śabda: the four horns as the four classes of word (nāma, ākhyāta, upasarga, nipāta); the three feet as the three tenses; the two heads as the eternal and the produced aspects of sound; the seven hands as the seven case-endings; the threefold binding as the three sites of articulation.
Note the shape of Patañjali's move: he does not say the sacrificial reading is wrong. He performs a second reading. His practice is the layer model in operation, executed by someone with no doctrinal stake in the layer model. He therefore belongs in the evidence, not in the pūrvapakṣa.
3. The verse itself signals that it is doing more. Apply the apūrvatā mark (§8.2). If the verse merely describes a sacrificial animal it has no apūrva — nothing that could not be known by looking at the animal. The numbers are anomalous even for the animal: four horns, two heads, seven hands. Read ādhibhautika alone, the verse describes nothing that exists.
4. The third reading, and its grading. Nīlakaṇṭha Caturdhara, in his Mantra-rahasya-prakāśikā (also circulated as the Mantra-Bhāgavata), reads a body of Ṛgvedic mantras as describing Kṛṣṇa-līlā and the saṅkīrtana-yajña of the Kali age, taking catuḥ-śṛṅga of the fourfold company of associates. Grade B. Nīlakaṇṭha is a real and substantial seventeenth-century commentator and the work is real, but he stands outside the Brahma-Mādhva-Gauḍīya line and his derivations are strongly nirukta-dependent. Under N2/N5 (§7.5) his readings support a reading rather than establish one. We present it as an attested third reading, not as proof.
All three readings stand, at three registers, and the verse is a textbook case of §5.1. Ādhibhautika: the sacrificial figure — affirmed. Ādhyātmika: the structure of śabda, per Patañjali — affirmed, Grade A as an attested reading of the highest authority in its field. Pāramārthika: Nīlakaṇṭha's reading — recorded, Grade B, presented as attested and not as settled.
What the case file actually establishes is smaller and more important than any of the three: that layered reading of the Ṛg Veda is not a Vaiṣṇava peculiarity but the normal practice of classical Indian scholarship, performed here by a grammarian with no theological motive.
The pūrvapakṣa is right that the presence of a reading does not establish its correctness, and the method has no procedure for adjudicating between registers, because on its own account they do not compete. A critic who regards the second and third readings as sophisticated free association has not been refuted by anything above; he has been shown that his position commits him to saying the same of Patañjali. Whether that is a cost he is willing to pay is his to decide.
Earlier drafts of this file assigned the four horns to the four Vedas and the seven hands to the seven metres, unattributed. That gloss is not Patañjali's and we have not located it in a named commentator; it has been withdrawn under rule N4 pending a source. Register entry D-25.