Before beginning his commentary on this chapter, Srila Sridhara Svami prays:

vag-isa yasya vadane

lakshmir yasya ca vakshasi

yasyaste hridaye samvit

tam nrishimham aham bhaje

"I worship Lord Nrisimha, within whose mouth reside the great masters of eloquence, upon whose chest resides the goddess of fortune, and within whose heart resides the divine potency of consciousness."

sampradaya-visuddhy-artham

sviya-nirbandha-yantritah

sruti-stuti-mita-vyakhyam

karishyami yatha-mati

"Desiring to purify my sampradaya and being bound by duty, I will briefly comment on the prayers of the personified Vedas, to the best of my realization."

srimad-bhagavatam purvaih

saratah sannishevitam

maya tu tad-upasprishtam

ucchishtam upaciyate

"In as much as Srimad-Bhagavatam has already been perfectly honored by my predecessors' explanations, I can only gather together the remnants of what they have honored."

Srila Visvanatha Cakravarti offers his own invocation:

mama ratna-vanig-bhavam

ratnany aparicinvatah

hasantu santo jihremi

na sva-svanta-vinoda-krit

"The saintly devotees may laugh at me for becoming a jewel merchant though I know nothing about precious jewels. But I feel no shame, for at least I may entertain them."

na me 'sti vaidushy api napi bhaktir

virakti-raktir na tathapi laulyat

su-durgamad eva bhavami veda-

stuty-artha-cintamani-rasi-gridhnuh

"Though I have no wisdom, devotion or detachment, I am still greedy to take the philosopher's stone of the Vedas' prayers from the fortress in which it is being kept."

mam nicatayam aviveka-vayuh

pravartate patayitum balac cet

likhamy atah svami-sanatana-sri-

krishnanghri-bha-stambha-kritavalambah

"If the wind of indiscretion -- my failure to acknowledge my lowly position -- threatens to knock me down, then while writing this commentary I must hold on to the effulgent pillars of the feet of Sridhara Svami, Sanatana Gosvami and Lord Sri Krishna."

pranamya sri-gurum bhuyah

sri-krishnam karunarnavam

loka-natham jagac-cakshuh

sri-sukam tam upasraye

"Repeatedly bowing down to my divine spiritual master and to Lord Sri Krishna, the ocean of mercy, I take shelter of Sri Sukadeva Gosvami, the protector of the world and its universal eye."

At the end of the preceding chapter, Sukadeva Gosvami told Parikshit Maharaja,

evam sva-bhaktayo rajan

bhagavan bhakta-bhaktiman

ushitvadisya san-margam

punar dvaravatim agat

"Thus, O King, the Personality of Godhead, who is the devotee of His own devotees, stayed for some time with His two great devotees, teaching them how perfect saints behave. Then He returned to Dvaraka." In this verse the word san-margam can be understood in at least three ways. In the first, sat is taken to mean "devotee of the Supreme Lord," and thus san-margam means "the path of bhakti-yoga, devotional service." In the second, with sat meaning "a seeker of transcendental knowledge," san-margam means "the philosophical path of knowledge," which has impersonal Brahman as its object. And in the third, with sat referring to the transcendental sound of the Vedas, san-margam means "the process of following Vedic injunctions." Both the second and the third of these interpretations of san-margam lead to the question of how the Vedas can describe the Absolute Truth.

Srila Sridhara Svami elaborately analyzes this problem in terms of the traditional discipline of Sanskrit poetics: We should consider that words have three kinds of expressive capacities, called sabda-vrittis. These are the different ways a word refers to its meaning, distinguished as mukhya-vritti, lakshana-vritti and gauna-vritti. The sabda-vritti termed mukhya is the primary, literal meaning of a word; this is also known as abhidha, a word's "denotation," or dictionary meaning. Mukhya-vritti is further divided into two subcategories, namely rudhi and yoga. A primary meaning is called rudhi when it is based on conventional usage, and yoga when it is derived from another word's meaning by regular etymological rules.

For example, the word go ("cow") is an example of rudhi, since its relation with its literal meaning is purely conventional. The denotation of the word pacaka ("chef"), on the other hand, is a yoga-vritti, through the word's derivation from the root pac ("to cook") by addition of the agent suffix -ka.

Beside its mukhya-vritti, or primary meaning, a word can also be used in a secondary, metaphorical sense. This usage is called lakshana. The rule is that a word should not be understood metaphorically if its mukhya-vritti makes sense in the given context; only after the mukhya-vritti fails to convey a word's meaning may lakshana-vritti be justifiably presumed. The function of lakshana is technically explained in the kavya-sastras as an extended reference, pointing to something in some way related to the object of the literal meaning. Thus, the phrase gangayam ghoshah literally means "the cowherd village in the Ganges." But that idea is absurd, so here gangayam should rather be understood by its lakshana to mean "on the bank of the Ganges," the bank being something related to the river. Gauna-vritti is a special kind of lakshana, where the meaning is extended to some idea of similarity. For example, in the statement simho devadattah ("Devadatta is a lion"), heroic Devadatta is metaphorically called a lion because of his lionlike qualities. In contrast, the example of the general kind of lakshana, namely gangayam ghoshah, involves a relationship not of similarity but of location.

In this first verse of the Eighty-seventh Chapter, Parikshit Maharaja expresses doubt as to how the words of the Vedas can refer to the Absolute Truth by any of the valid kinds of sabda-vritti. He asks, katham sakshat caranti: How can the Vedas directly describe Brahman by rudha-mukhya-vritti, literal meaning based on convention? After all, the Absolute is anirdesya, inaccessible to designation. And how can the Vedas even describe Brahman by gauna-vritti, metaphor based on similar qualities?

The Vedas are guna-vrittayah, full of qualitative descriptions, but Brahman is nirguna, without qualities. Obviously, a metaphor based on similar qualities cannot apply in the case of something that has no qualities. Furthermore, Parikshit Maharaja points out that Brahman is sad-asatah param, beyond all causes and effects. Having no connection with any manifest existence, subtle or gross, the Absolute cannot be expressed by either yoga-vritti, a meaning derived etymologically, or lakshana, metaphor, since both require some relationship of Brahman to other entities.

Thus King Parikshit is puzzled as to how the words of the Vedas can directly describe the Absolute Truth.