Kama Sutra: A Guide to the Art of Pleasure

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By using the Web site, you confirm that you have read, understood, and agreed to be bound by the Terms and Conditions. It is about the art of living – about finding a partner, maintaining power in a marriage, committing adultery, living as or with a courtesan, using drugs – and also about the positions in sexual intercourse. You will learn how to heighten your awareness of your own and your partner’s bodies, and achieve an emotional intimacy and sexual intensity never before experienced.

This clear, accurate translation conveys all the original flavour and feel of this elegant, intimate and hugely enjoyable work; a masterpiece of pithy description and a wry account of human desires and foibles.Human relationships, sex and emotional fulfillment are a significant part of the post-Vedic Sanskrit literature such as the major Hindu epics: the Mahabharata and the Ramayana. The Kamasutra, states the Indologist and Sanskrit literature scholar Ludo Rocher, discourages adultery but then devotes "not less than fifteen sutras (1. Doniger describes them as a "kind of atomic string (thread) of meanings", which are so cryptic that any translation is more like deciphering and filling in the text. For each aspect of Kama, the Kamasutra presents a diverse spectrum of options and regional practices.

The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. The male-female union is portrayed in all its splendor through the use of Indian miniatures and Khajuraho sculptures.

Vatsyayana cites earlier – now lost – Indian texts from the Babhraya's school, for these eight categories of embraces.

In the rare mention of caste found in the text, it is about a man finding his legal wife and the advice that humorous stories to seduce a woman should be about "other virgins of same jati (caste)".

The text acknowledges the Hindu concept of Purusharthas, and lists desire, sexuality, and emotional fulfillment as one of the proper goals of life. In contrast, the Indologist Wendy Doniger, who has co-translated the Kama Sutra and published many papers on related Hindu texts, states that the surviving version of the Kama Sutra must have been revised or composed after 225 CE because it mentions the Abhiras and the Andhras dynasties that did not co-rule major regions of ancient India before that year. Doniger notes Kama Sutra was composed "sometime in the third century of the common era, most likely in its second half, at the dawn of the Gupta Empire".

It leads to emotional fulfillment in many forms such as more friends for both, relatives, progeny, amorous and sexual relationship between the couple, and the conjugal pursuit of dharma (spiritual and ethical life) and artha (economic life). The defining object of the Indian Kamasastra literature, according to Laura Desmond – an anthropologist and a professor of Religious Studies, is the "harmonious sensory experience" from a good relationship between "the self and the world", by discovering and enhancing sensory capabilities to "affect and be affected by the world". The book's opening verse declares marriage to be a conducive means to "a pure and natural love between the partners", states Upadhyaya.The various forms of intimacy reflect the intent and provide means to engage a combination of senses for pleasure.