oṁ namo bhagavate vāsudevāya

O  my Lord, Śrī Kṛṣṇa, son of Vasudeva, O all-pervading Personality of  Godhead, I offer my respectful obeisances unto You. I meditate upon Lord  Śrī Kṛṣṇa because He is the Absolute Truth and the primeval cause of  all causes of the creation, sustenance and destruction of the manifested  universes. He is directly and indirectly conscious of all  manifestations, and He is independent because there is no other cause  beyond Him. It is He only who first imparted the Vedic knowledge unto  the heart of Brahmājī, the original living being. By Him even the great  sages and demigods are placed into illusion, as one is bewildered by the  illusory representations of water seen in fire, or land seen on water.  Only because of Him do the material universes, temporarily manifested by  the reactions of the three modes of nature, appear factual, although  they are unreal. I therefore meditate upon Him, Lord Śrī Kṛṣṇa, who is  eternally existent in the transcendental abode, which is forever free  from the illusory representations of the material world. I meditate upon  Him, for He is the Absolute Truth.

Obeisances  unto the Personality of Godhead Vāsudeva directly indicate Lord Śrī  Kṛṣṇa, who is the divine son of Vasudeva and Devakī. This fact will be  more explicitly explained in the text of this work. Śrī Vyāsadeva  asserts herein that Śrī Kṛṣṇa is the original Personality of Godhead,  and all others are His direct or indirect plenary portions or portions  of the portion. Śrīla Jīva Gosvāmī has even more explicitly explained  the subject matter in his Kṛṣṇa-sandarbha. And Brahmā, the original living being, has explained the subject of Śrī Kṛṣṇa substantially in his treatise named Brahma-saṁhitā. In an Upaniṣad in the Sāma-veda, it is also stated that Lord Śrī Kṛṣṇa is the divine son of Devakī.  Therefore, in this prayer, the first proposition holds that Lord Śrī  Kṛṣṇa is the primeval Lord, and if any transcendental nomenclature is to  be understood as belonging to the Absolute Personality of Godhead, it  must be the name indicated by the word Kṛṣṇa, which means the  all-attractive. In Bhagavad-gītā, in many places, the Lord asserts Himself to be the original Personality  of Godhead, and this is confirmed by Arjuna, and also by great sages  like Nārada, Vyāsa, and many others. In the Padma Purāṇa, it is  also stated that out of the innumerable names of the Lord, the name of  Kṛṣṇa is the principal one. Vāsudeva indicates the plenary portion of  the Personality of Godhead, and all the different forms of the Lord,  being identical with Vāsudeva, are indicated in this text. The name  Vāsudeva particularly indicates the divine son of Vasudeva and Devakī.  Śrī Kṛṣṇa is always meditated upon by the paramahaṁsas, who are the perfected ones among those in the renounced order of life.