Bṛhad-āraṇyaka 2.4.5: For the Sake of the Self
"Not for the sake of the husband, indeed, is the husband dear, but for the sake of the self is the husband dear. The self, indeed, is to be seen, to be heard, to be reflected upon, to be meditated upon."
1. The word ātman is not univocal, and both parties know it. Across the Upaniṣads it denotes the individual self, the body, the self as such, and the Supreme Self; disambiguation is contextual in every instance. Neither side can win by asserting a default sense.
2. Apply upakrama–upasaṁhāra (§8.2). The dialogue opens with Maitreyī's question about immortality — what will not make her immortal, and what will. Under the strongest mark, the subject is that by which immortality is attained.
3. Apply the S2 test (§6.2). The predicate: by knowing this, all this is known. Can the individual self bear that predicate? Knowing one's own self does not, on the face of it, yield knowledge of everything else — unless the self known is that on which everything depends (the Vaiṣṇava reading), rather than an asserted monistic identity. The question is which reading the corpus supports.
4. The corpus supplies the analogy explicitly. The Bhāgavata states the relation in an image that is exactly the structure this passage requires: as watering the root of a tree nourishes trunk and branches, and as supplying food to the stomach nourishes the senses and limbs, so by offering to the Infallible all beings are satisfied. Everything is nourished through one thing — not because everything is that thing, but because everything depends on it. This is the mechanism by which knowing one yields knowing all without collapsing the distinction between them.
5. The dearness argument. The passage does not say the husband is unreal; it says he is dear for the sake of something else. The construction is instrumental and presupposes two terms. A reading on which the second term is identical with the first empties the sentence: nothing is dear for the sake of itself for the sake of itself. The grammar of ātmanas tu kāmāya — a dative of purpose with a distinct genitive — favours a relation between two things. Under L4 (§9.2) the reading requiring no collapse is preferred.
6. Attestation. Unlike CF-04, this Upaniṣad is among the ten on which Madhva wrote, and his Bṛhad-āraṇyaka-bhāṣya reads ātman in this passage as the Supreme. The reading is therefore attested in the lineage, not merely constructed by its rules — Grade A for the attestation; Grade B for the argument as we have assembled it here, which is ours.
Ātman here denotes the Supreme Self. Established on upakrama–upasaṁhāra, the S2 overflow at “by knowing this, all is known,” the instrumental grammar of the dearness clause, and the attestation of Madhva's bhāṣya.
The individual self is not thereby denied; it is the term for whose sake nothing else is finally dear. This is also the reading on which §13.2 turns, where the nīti maxim “abandon the earth itself for the sake of the ātman” is read at its fourth register.
What this file establishes is that the Vaiṣṇava reading is directly grounded in the passage's own grammar and marks, and does not require the interpretive violence critics allege.