§5.1 The governing statement
Vedic texts are multi-tiered semantic architectures. A single passage simultaneously operates across distinct, non-contradictory registers. The failure to distinguish these registers produces crude literalism on the one hand and groundless allegorizing on the other.
The tradition states the layer count directly, in a verse quoted constantly across the Mādhva corpus: trayo 'rthāḥ sarva-vedeṣu — in all the Vedas there are three meanings; in the whole Bhārata, ten; and even the thousand names of Viṣṇu carry, without interruption, a hundred.
Stripped of the numbers, the doctrine asserts that a Vedic string is not a container with one thing in it. Density of meaning increases with the ontological weight of the text, and a reader who extracts one reading and stops has not finished, whatever the quality of that one reading.
§5.2 The four registers
- 1. Ādhibhautika (Physical / Elemental Register) — Physical entities, sacrificial apparatus, terrestrial events. Agni is fire on the altar; the bull is a bull. Recoverable by grammar and lexicon alone. This is the domain of academic Indology, and it is right about what it is about.
- 2. Ādhidaivika (Cosmic / Deva Register) — The presiding cosmic administrators (Indra, Vāyu, Agni, Sūrya) governing natural forces under divine mandate. Reading requires knowing the cosmological structure the text presupposes.
- 3. Ādhyātmika (Psychological / Internal Register) — Internal faculties, prāṇic flows, consciousness states, the indwelling jīva. This is the register Patañjali uses for ṚV 4.58.2 (CF-02) and the register of most Upaniṣadic pedagogy.
- 4. Pāramārthika (The Ultimate Referent) — Every one of the above names, in the appropriate context, denotes the one Person on whom all of them depend (Puruṣottama / Viṣṇu / Kṛṣṇa), the sole independent ground (svatantra-tattva) of all existence. This is the register the method exists to reach.
Two clarifications prevent most misuse of this scheme, and both are load-bearing.
The registers are not degrees of literalness
The pāramārthika reading is not “figurative” while the ādhibhautika reading is “literal.” On the tradition's own account the relation runs the other way: the ultimate reading is the primary reading, in the technical sense of §7, and the physical reading is the derived and restricted one. This inversion is the single most important structural fact in Part II, and §7 is entirely about it.
The registers do not compete
A passage does not either describe a fire ritual or describe Bhagavān. Both readings can be simultaneously correct because they answer different questions of the same string, the way a circuit diagram and a photograph of a board are both true of the board. What the method rejects is the claim that the photograph exhausts the board.
§5.3 Layers as addressing modes
A single memory address in a running system can be read as a raw byte, an integer, a character, a pointer, or an instruction. None of these readings is a metaphor for the others; context selects. Read the address in the wrong mode and you do not get a poetic version of the right answer, you get a wrong answer that looks perfectly well-formed.
This maps onto the Ārk Engine's data model exactly, which is why the platform stores mūla and each commentary as separately addressed nodes across the seven-layer scheme (L01–L07, §19.2) rather than merging them into a single “text with notes.” When citing a passage, the citing node must declare which layer is being addressed, which prevents the conflation of ritual instruction with metaphysical definition.
Where the analogy fails. In a computer the interpretation is arbitrary — the bits carry no preference. The tradition's claim is the opposite: the word–meaning relation is fixed and non-arbitrary (§1.2), and one of the readings is primary by nature rather than by convention. Push the analogy past that point and it starts arguing for a relativism the method explicitly denies.