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The Kama Sutra of Vatsyayana ("Kama Sutra" is Sanskrit
for "Aphorisms of Love") is an extraordinary and fascinating work that
deserves careful reading and study. Written in ancient India, it is
essentially a technical guide, a scholarly treatise if you will, to sexual
enjoyment and other sensual pleasures. It also contains profound
historical and anthropological insights into the mores and customs of
ancient India. The modern reader will often be surprised by how markedly
different the cultural paradigms presented in the Kama
Sutra are
from those of today.
Almost nothing is known about the writer, Vatsyayana,
or the exact date he wrote this work. Regarding the date, Sir Richard F.
Burton (whose 1883 translation is used partially in this site—more on this
below) determined from internal evidence that the Kama
Sutra was written sometime between the first and sixth centuries A.D.
Many scholars now believe the Kama
Sutra was written during, or shortly before, the Gupta period (320-540
A.D.), which has also been called the Classical Age of India. Regarding
the writer Vatsyayana, Burton makes the following insightful
remarks:
"...He [Vatsyayana] states that he wrote the work while
leading the life of a religious student (probably at Benares) and while
wholly engaged in the contemplation of the Deity. He must have arrived at
a certain age at that time, for throughout he gives us the benefit of his
experience, and of his opinions, and these bear the stamp of age rather
than of youth; indeed the work could hardly have been written by a young
man."
One comment should be made about the so-called "Kama Sutra"
now available at various sites on the Internet. That text document, the
so-called "sexual positions list" is only a very small snippet of the
entire work (a portion of one chapter out of a total of 35 chapters plus a
Salutation.) It is also not from the Burton translation.
Although legal considerations compel us to state that
this site is For Adults Only (because Vatsyayana deals with the subject matter of
human sexuality in a frank and forthright manner), it is a shame that this
restriction must be applied since this site is clearly non-prurient in
nature. The whole scholarly (and some would say, practical) character of
the Kama Sutra is nothing like most works of erotica written
today—some would even assert that the Kama
Sutra is wholly appropriate even for older teens to read because of its
historical and anthropological insights into our own culture and to human
sexuality in general. Of course, our society is a lot different from
ancient Indian society. Thus, many of the subjects and cultural practices
Vatsyayana discusses are very alien, and even bizarre, to our frame of
reference. But that is what makes the Kama
Sutra so fascinating—something written almost two millennia ago, in a
culture far removed us, tells us today that there is more than one way for
a society to regulate human sexual practice and conduct. The obvious
implication for us today is that we need to be very careful when we
promote certain societal paradigms regarding human sexuality as somehow
being fixed, absolute and timeless. They clearly are not.
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Contents
Lying down positions:
Preludes
Indrani
Churning
Mixture
Yawning
Cobra
Conch
Pestle
Sitting positions:
Black bee
Mare
Swing
Bamboo
Knot
Sporting of a
Sparrow
Tigress
Sharpening
Rear-entry positions:
Inversion
Elephant
Dog
Standing positions:
Knee elbow
Stag
Tripod
Oral pleasures:
Lovemaking of the
crow
Exotic positions:
Apadravyas
Unified
lovers
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