What is Kama Sutra?

What is Kama Sutra?

Of all the treasures of learning that Europeans have
acquired from the Far East, Kama Sutra is perhaps the best
known, along with Yoga and Buddhism. Starting with the
industrial revolution of the late 18th century and the
advent of fashionable foreign traveling, Europe and Northern
America have been flooded with art objects, ideas, values
and philosophy from the Far East that changed, to a certain
extent, our way of thinking. Busy Westerners obsessed by
tomorrow are intrigued and fascinated by the attitudes of
people who are content to live this day and who are not
afraid of the future.

When mentioning Kama Sutra, most people think of it as an
exotic help book on sexual satisfaction or just an ancient
porn magazine. The complete name of the book is actually
“Vatsyayana’s Aphorisms on Love” (“Vatsyayana Kamasutram”)
and it’s a treaty made of 36 chapters. The aim of this
collection of aphorisms is to provide a comprehensive guide
to sex, relationships with courtesans, courtship of married
women, marriage and, finally, improving one’s chances to
have good sex through the use of herbs, substances, spells
and sex toys. As you can see, the purpose of this book was
to become a definitive guide to what love and sex meant to
the Indian society around the 4th century AD.

Aside from sex and love, the “Aphorisms on Love” is a very
orthodox book, after the fashion of the society that spawned
it. Its purpose is to teach the lover what to do to get the
woman he desires while still protecting both his and hers
good names and reputations. Reputation was extremely
important all over the ancient world, not just in India, and
the person who forfeited it for such an insignificant thing
as sex was considered to be frivolous, not worthy of the
esteem of others. Vatsyayana himself, a celibate scholar,
believed that sex was not bad in itself, but that engaging
in it was certainly frivolous and sinful.

The 36 chapters are each written by an expert of the issue
and cover a wide range of issues, such as observations on
the daily life of a citizen, sex positions, personal
adornment, how to kiss, gaining the confidence of women and
the means by which courtesans get money. The best known part
of the book, the study of sex and sexual positions, makes up
only about 20 percent of the whole text. Nevertheless, those
who are truly interested in sex should read the entire book.
After numerous centuries the ancient theory is still
surprisingly accurate because people still want the same
basic things from one another.

Although this may sound very unlikely, at the bottom Kama
Sutra is somewhat akin to Machiavelli’s “The Prince”,
although the Indian book on love is much more careful to
observe the morals of the time. Both books are guides to
some of the aspects of their respective societies and both
deal with them in a frank and realistic manner. Vatsyayana
is not fooling himself that men and women are naturally
virtuous creatures and so was perfectly willing to give
advice on how to seduce married women, just as Machiavelli
knew that a prince is bound to do evil things from time to
time.