The first sūtra of Vātsyāyana's Kāmasūtra pays homage, not only to kāma, but to all three components of the trivarga:

The reason for this initial statement is provided in the next sūtra:

Neither Schmidt's (“Weil sie in dem Lehrbuche immer wiederkehren”) nor Upadhyaya's (“The three Aims of Life that are dealt with in this Shastra”) translations adequately express the meaning of this sūtra. What Vātsyāyana claims is that he pays homage to dharma, artha, and kāma, because they are the three topics which are “genuine, relevant” (prakṛta) to a śāstra, i.e., to any śāstra.

The fact that all three elements of the trivarga are interconnected has been stressed elsewhere in the Kāmasūtra. In a sequence of sūtras which will be discussed later in this article, and in which Vātsyāyana suggests that different aspects of the trivarga shall be the primary ones in different periods of a person's life (kālaṃ vibhajya), at the same time he emphasizes that, throughout life,

That means that in any period of life in which one of the elements of the trivarga is the primary one, the other two should be natural adjuncts of it, and that, under no circumstances, any one of the trivarga should be detrimental to the other two. Again, later in the same chapter: