  A new chiral SU(3) Lagrangian is proposed to describe the properties of kaons
and antikaons in the nuclear medium, the ground state of dense matter and the
kaon-nuclear interactions consistently.
  The saturation properties of nuclear matter are reproduced as well as the
results of the Dirac-Br\"{u}ckner theory. Our numerical results show that the
kaon effective mass might be changed only moderately in the nuclear medium due
to the highly non-linear density effects. After taking into account the
coupling between the omega meson and the kaon, we obtain similar results for
the effective kaon and antikaon energies as calculated in the
one-boson-exchange model while in our model the parameters of the kaon-nuclear
interactions are constrained by the SU(3) chiral symmetry.
