Khila Kanda. Adhyaya 6, Brahmana 2. The five fires, and the two paths after death
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Each mantra is given four ways: the Sanskrit in its Devanagari script, the same sounds in Roman letters, an English translation set in our own voice, and then the line once more in plain words, for a first and unhurried reading.
Not every passage is opened to the same depth. A few central mantras carry the full cross-school commentary, where the schools are set side by side. The rest are kept here whole and faithful, set in their place but not expounded, so the book stays entire and nothing is dropped for being thought minor.
Where the schools read a line differently, the difference is kept open. None is crowned and none is corrected. Each is met on its own terms, and where they contradict, the contradiction is left standing for you to sit with.
First fire, the heavenly world
That world, O Gautama, is the fire. The sun is its fuel; the rays, its smoke; the day, its flame; the quarters, its embers; the intermediate quarters, its sparks. In this fire the gods offer faith. Out of that oblation King Soma arises.
The first of the five fires: the heavenly world itself is a sacrificial fire, with the sun as its fuel, the sun's rays as smoke, the day as flame, the four directions as embers, the intermediate directions as sparks. In this fire the gods offer the oblation of faith (sraddha), and from that offering King Soma (the moon) comes to be.
pañcāgni-vidyā
the doctrine of the five fires. The chain of five sacrificial fires, the heavenly world, the rain-god, this world, man, and woman, through whose oblations faith becomes an embodied person who is born and dies.
In the commentaries
The first fire is the yonder world itself, heaven taken as an altar, and Sankara is careful that this is a meditation (upasana), not a claim about literal flames. The sun is its fuel, the rays its smoke, the day its flame, the quarters its embers and the in-between quarters its sparks; into this fire the gods pour faith (sraddha), and from that offering King Soma, the moon, is born. Sankara reads sraddha here not as mere belief but as the subtle liquid essence of the offerings, the water of the rite raised to its finest form, so that the dead who have sacrificed are themselves carried up and reconstituted as the lunar body. This is the opening of the great circuit: the self that lived by works does not vanish at death but is offered, stage by stage, into ever grosser fires.