The god of death opens his teaching to Nachiketa with a diagnostic: two paths are always available, but they do not go the same way. The one who chooses well is rare. The one who teaches well is rarer still.
Yama is the god of death. He has agreed to teach Nachiketa — a boy who sat three nights at his door without food or water, refusing to leave until the teaching was given. Yama begins not with metaphysics but with a diagnosis.
Two paths are always available to a person. The pleasant (preyas) — what feels good now, what the senses reach for, what provides comfort and security in the immediate. The good (śreyas) — what actually leads to the highest human possibility, which may not be comfortable, which may not be immediately appealing, but which leads to liberation rather than to more of the same cycle.
Most people choose preyas. Not because they are stupid. Because preyas is immediately available, clearly rewarding, and the reward of śreyas requires a longer view — a willingness to see that the pleasant things do not deliver what they seem to promise. The Kaṭha frames this as the foundational choice, made not once but continually: every moment, you are choosing between the path that deepens the inquiry and the path that postpones it for something more comfortable.
The wise one (dhīraḥ) chooses śreyas. The dhīraḥ is not the one who has already arrived. It is the one whose discrimination (viveka) is sufficiently developed to see the difference and to act on what they see. Yama is calling Nachiketa a dhīraḥ — the boy refused the pleasant alternatives Yama offered him (cattle, wealth, a beautiful kingdom) and insisted on the teaching. He has already demonstrated the choice.
The śreyas-preyas distinction is the Kaṭha's practical articulation of the viveka concept — discrimination between what is real and what is not, between what leads to liberation and what perpetuates saṃsāra. The two terms have a precise relationship: preyas is not wrong in itself. Pleasure is not evil. The pleasant objects of the senses are real goods at their own level. The problem is not their existence but the misidentification of them as final goods — the error of treating temporary, conditional satisfaction as the same kind of thing as the unconditional fullness the self is actually seeking.
Verse 1.2.3 adds the epistemological observation: "The pleasant things approach a person, entangle them, and they are caught." The movement of preyas is toward the person — the senses reach outward and pleasant objects draw them. The movement of śreyas is different: it requires the person to turn inward, against the habitual outward pull of the senses. This is why Yama describes the path of śreyas as the path of discrimination: it requires the faculty of viveka to be active and to override the default pull of preyas.
The śreyas-preyas distinction appears in a modified form throughout the Advaita tradition. In the Vivekacūḍāmaṇi's sādhanacatuṣṭaya, vairāgya (dispassion) is the quality that corresponds to a mature preference for śreyas over preyas — not as an act of will but as a natural loosening of the grip of preyas following from viveka. The Kaṭha's framing is more urgent: the preference for śreyas must be cultivated actively, because the pull of preyas is the default condition of the unreflective mind.
Śaṅkara's commentary on 1.2.1–4 notes that Yama praises Nachiketa precisely for having already made the śreyas-preyas choice: the boy was offered wealth, power, pleasure, and a long life — all preyas — and refused them in favour of the teaching about the self. Yama uses Nachiketa's own decision as the first exhibit in the teaching: "you have already chosen correctly without knowing the full content of what you chose for." The teaching that follows is the full content.