CF-05: The Tryambaka Mantra

The pūrvapakṣa is strong and the ādhidaivika reading is not contested. The mantra is addressed to Tryambaka and at the ādhidaivika register Tryambaka is Rudra. The platform displays that reading at that layer without qualification.

1. Where the S2 test engages. The predicate that overflows is in the second line: mṛtyor mukṣīya māmṛtāt — release from death, with immortality expressly not renounced. This is a request for mokṣa, precisely delimited. Run S2: can the granting of that fall within a delegated office?

The corpus answers directly. Śvetāśvatara 3.8: tam eva viditvāti mṛtyum eti nānyaḥ panthā vidyate 'yanāya — knowing Him alone, one goes beyond death; there is no other path. And Bhagavad-gītā 8.16: ābrahma-bhuvanāl lokāḥ punar āvartino 'rjuna | mām upetya tu kaunteya punar janma na vidyate — from the realm of Brahmā downward the worlds are subject to return; but having reached Me there is no rebirth. Both Grade A.

Together these place the granting of release from death outside every post in the created order, up to and including the highest. The predicate in the second line therefore fails S2, and the procedure continues to S4 — not by preference, but because the corpus has stated that this particular gift is not in the gift of an officeholder.

2. The derivation, under N1–N5. Tryambaka admits more than one derivation: three-eyed (ambaka as eye), or he of three mothers, or, in the reading the Vaiṣṇava commentators use, from ambā in the sense of the one addressed with reverence in three modes. Each is grammatically available; under N3 multiple valid derivations are expected. Under N5 no derivation establishes the reading — establishment is by S2 and the corpus above. The derivation shows how the word can carry the reading; the corpus shows why it must.

3. Cross-sampradāya material, and why it is not adopted wholesale. A developed Śrī Vaiṣṇava commentarial tradition reads the Śatarudrīya and this mantra as glorifying Nṛsiṁha, deploying Raṅgarāmānuja's exegesis and Parāśara Bhaṭṭar's Sahasranāma commentary. Much of the philological observation is portable; the conclusions are not. Those readings are embedded in Viśiṣṭādvaita ontology — śarīra-śarīri-bhāva — which the Brahma-Mādhva line rejects in favour of irreducible difference. Importing the conclusion while discarding the premise is not scholarship, it is scavenging (failure mode M14). Material from another sampradāya may be used for its philological observations, cited by name, with its ontological commitments identified and its conclusions re-derived on Brahma-Vaiṣṇava premises or not used at all.

Two-layer reading, both displayed. Ādhidaivika: addressed to Tryambaka-Rudra, in a Rudra ritual context — Grade A, and the reading of the living ritual tradition. Pāramārthika: the second line's request exceeds any delegated office by ŚvU 3.8 and BG 8.16; at that site the address reaches the one in whom release from death actually rests — Grade B, an inference by our rules, not an attestation.

The Nṛsiṁha specification is Grade C in this lineage: attested in Śrī Vaiṣṇava literature, not established on Mādhva premises, quarantined accordingly. Register entry D-11.