Kama Sutra - a history for your information 211108

24 Nov 08

Kama Sutra - a history for your information 211108

Discovering the 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 with the here and now are fascinated and intrigued by the attitudes of people who are content to live one day at a time and who are not afraid of the future.

Whenever the legendary Kama Sutra is mentioned, the first thing people think of most people think of is an exotic self help book on sexual satisfaction and an ancient porn magazine. The correct title is “Vatsyayana’s Aphorisms on Love” (“Vatsyayana Kamasutram”) and it’s a treaty consisting 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 of the sutra were each written by experts on the issues and covers a wide range of issues, such as observations on the daily life of a citizen, sexual positions, personal adornment, how to kiss, how to woo a women and the means by which courtesans earn money.

Perhaps the best known section of the book is the study of sex and sexual positions and techniques, makes up a mere 20 % of the text as a whole. But nevertheless, those scholars out there who are truly interested in sex should read the entire book. After numerous centuries the theories are still accurate because people still want the same things from one another..

As surprising as it sounds when it comes down to it the central tenants of the Kama Sutra are akin to Machiavelli’s “The Prince”, while the Indian book is much more careful to observe the morals of the time. Both books serve as guides to aspects of their respective societies and deal with them in a frank realistic manner.

The scholar Vatsyayana was not fooling himself when he wrote about men and women being 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.

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