Text 15
tad asya kauṣārava śarma-dātur
hareḥ kathām eva kathāsu sāram
uddhṛtya puṣpebhya ivārta-bandho
śivāya naḥ kīrtaya tīrtha-kīrteḥ
tat — therefore; asya — His; kauṣārava — O Maitreya; śarma-dātuḥ — of one who awards good fortune; hareḥ — of the Lord; kathām — topics; eva — only; kathāsu — of all topics; sāram — the essence; uddhṛtya — by quoting; puṣpebhyaḥ — from the flowers; iva — like that; ārta-bandho — O friend of the distressed; śivāya — for welfare; naḥ — of us; kīrtaya — kindly describe; tīrtha — pilgrimage; kīrteḥ — of glorious.
O Maitreya, O friend of the distressed, the glories of the Supreme Lord can alone do good for people all over the world. Therefore, just as bees collect honey from flowers, kindly describe the essence of all topics — the topics of the Lord.
There are many topics for different persons in different modes of material nature, but the essential topics are those in relationship with the Supreme Lord. Unfortunately, materially affected conditioned souls are all more or less averse to topics of the Supreme Lord because some of them do not believe in the existence of God and some of them believe only in the impersonal feature of the Lord. In both cases there is nothing for them to say of God. Both the nonbelievers and the impersonalists deny the essence of all topics; therefore, they engage in topics of relativity in various ways, either in sense gratification or in mental speculation. For the pure devotees like Vidura, the topics of both the mundaners and the mental speculators are useless in all respects. Thus Vidura requested Maitreya to talk of the essence only, the talks of Kṛṣṇa, and nothing else.