The ladle, the ghee, the fire, and the goal: all of it is Brahman.

Read as strict non-dual identity, where the parts never truly existed apart from Brahman.

Take the verse at its full strength. The instrument, the oblation, the fire, the doer, the act, and the fruit have no separate existence whatsoever; the entire array is mere Brahman. The silver mistaken in the shell, the snake mistaken in the rope, these never truly existed as what they appeared to be; they were overlays of ignorance, now cancelled by the knowledge of Brahman's truth. Because the perception of distinct factors is the only thing that ever lets a rite bind, once that perception is ground away the action becomes, at the level of highest truth, no action at all, and it dissolves without yielding any fruit, exactly like a burnt cloth that keeps its shape but can no longer be worn. This is not a command to meditate Brahman onto ritual items as a devotional overlay; it is a report of how the knower already sees, and any reading that props the vision on a symbol is refused, since a symbol-based vision could never grant the very liberation the verse promises.

For those who hold the parts genuinely real, as Brahman's own effects and body.

The parts are Brahman, but not because they are unreal. They are Brahman because they are Brahman's effects and have Brahman for their inner self. The ladle, being an effect of Brahman, is Brahman; the oblation has itself become Brahman; the fire is Brahman; the doer is Brahman; so the whole action, having Brahman for its self, is made of Brahman while it genuinely, really continues. The seeing here is a sustained recognition that everything is the supreme Self's own body, a truth scripture itself teaches. For one who seeks liberation, the action being done becomes, joined to this steady recognition, of the very nature of the highest Brahman, taking the form of knowledge and becoming a direct means to beholding the Self, which, having Brahman for its self, has itself become Brahman.

On the reading that all this is Brahman by total dependence, never by sameness of form.

Do not hear this as a claim of identity. Everything here is called Brahman only because its very being and its every activity depend wholly on the Lord, not because it shares his own form. As the Padma Purana has it, the sages call the Lord all precisely because all things are dependent on him, not because all things share his own nature. The instrument, the oblation, the fire, and the doer are Brahman by total dependence on him and by his being the inner ruler of each of them, never by being non-different from him in essence. The action, together with the absorption resting on it, is Brahman strictly in this sense, and any stronger reading of sameness is explicitly set aside.

For the yogin who sees the whole universe offering itself back into the fire of awareness.

See this as the living self-offering of the whole universe back into its own source. The universe, itself made of nothing but Brahman, is the oblation; it has proceeded from that very source and now enters it again, poured into the supreme awakening, a fire wholly at peace, so that its blaze may only increase. This is not the cancelling of the world but its return into the flaming fullness of awareness. The yogin whose absorption is exactly this Brahman-act reaches Brahman alone, since there is nothing else to reach. This reading is held to be a supreme secret, transmitted only through the living oral tradition of the teacher, and it explicitly sets aside any account that reduces the ritual items to mere qualifiers of Brahman.

Read as Brahman threaded through the action and every limb of the act.

Take this as a further unfolding beyond the earlier seeing of inaction within action. Here Brahman is threaded through the action itself and through each of its limbs in turn: the offering, the oblation, the fire, and the agent are each, one after another, named Brahman, so there is no second thing the work could lead to. Brahman alone is the goal reached, not any other fruit, for one whose one-pointed mind rests in Brahman as action in exactly this way. In this reading the fourfold structure of the rite dissolves, limb by limb, into the single reality each limb was always made of.

Read as the whole apparatus of ritual, imagined until knowledge cancels it.

Hear this plainly. A sacrifice is built of many named parts: a deity who receives, a substance offered, a fruit aimed at, tools that carry the work, mantras that light it, a sacrificer who acts, a fire, a place and a time. All of this busy structure is only ever imagined for want of knowing Brahman, exactly as a person in poor light imagines a snake or a stream where there is really only a rope. Once the knowledge of Brahman's truth cancels this imagining, the work may still appear to continue before the eyes, yet, like a cloth already burned to ash, it can bear no more fruit. The seeing of Brahman is itself praised as the very being of the sacrifice, and reading the offering as a mere meditation aimed at some chosen reward is set aside as a misreading of a passage whose whole subject is the knowledge of Brahman.