The Kama Sutra - Principles of Love (Unabridged)
The Kama Sutra by Mallanaga Vatsyayana - is an ancient Indian Sanskrit text on sexuality, eroticism and emotional fulfillment in life. Attributed to Vatsyayana, the Kama Sutra is neither exclusively nor predominantly a sex manual on sex positions, but rather was written as a guide to the art of living well, the nature of love, finding a life partner, maintaining one's love life, and other aspects pertaining to pleasure-oriented faculties of human life. It is a sutra-genre text with terse aphoristic verses that have survived into the modern era with different bhasyas (exposition and commentaries). The text is a mix of prose and anustubh-meter poetry verses. The text acknowledges the Hindu concept of Purusharthas, and lists desire, sexuality, and emotional fulfillment as one of the proper goals of life. Its chapters discuss methods for courtship, training in the arts to be socially engaging, finding a partner, flirting, maintaining power in a married life, when and how to commit adultery, sexual positions, and other topics. The majority of the book is about the philosophy and theory of love, what triggers desire, what sustains it, and how and when it is good or bad.
Epics
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 ancient Indian view has been, states Johann Meyer, that love and sex are a delightful necessity. Though she is reserved and selective, 'a woman stands in very great need of surata (amorous or sexual pleasure)', and 'the woman has a far stronger erotic disposition, her delight in the sexual act is greater than a man's'.
Contents
Vatsyayana's Kama Sutra states it has 1,250 verses distributed over 36 chapters in 64 sections organised into 7 books. This statement is included in the opening chapter of the text, a common practice in ancient Hindu texts likely included to prevent major and unauthorized expansions of a popular text. The text that has survived into the modern era has 67 sections, and this list is enumerated in Book 7 and in Yashodhara's Sanskrit commentary (bhasya) on the text.
The Kamasutra uses a mixture of prose and poetry, and the narration has the form of a dramatic fiction where two characters are called the nayaka (man) and nayika (woman), aided by the characters called pitamarda (libertine), vita (pander) and vidushaka (jester). This format follows the teachings found in the Sanskrit classic named the Natyasastra. The teachings and discussions found in the Kamasutra extensively incorporate ancient Hindu mythology and legends.
Discussion
Across human cultures, states Michel Foucault, 'the truth of sex' has been produced and shared by two processes. One method has been ars erotica texts, while the other has been the scientia sexualis literature. The first are typically of the hidden variety and shared by one person to another, between friends or from a master to a student, focusing on the emotions and experience, sans physiology. These bury many of the truths about sex and human sexual nature. The second are empirical studies of the type found in biology, physiology and medical texts, focusing on the physiology and objective observations, sans emotions. The Kamasutra belongs to both camps, states Doniger. It discusses, in its distilled form, the physiology, the emotions and the experience while citing and quoting prior Sanskrit scholarship on the nature of kama.
Mallanaga Vatsyayana (Author), Mark F. Smith (Narrator)
Audiobook
