Kama Sutra: Encyclopedia - Kama Sutra

Kama Sutra

Kamasutram, generally known to the Western world as Kama Sutra, is an ancient Hindu text on human sexual behavior, widely considered to be the standard work on love in Sanskrit literature. The text was composed by Vatsyayana, (pronounced Vaats-yaa-yan), as a brief summary of various earlier works belonging to a tradition known generically as Kama Shastra, the science of love. Kama is literally desire. Sutra signfies a thread, or discourse threaded on a series of aphorisms. Sutra was a standard term for a technical text, thus also the Yogasutram of Patanjali. The text is originally known as Vatsyayana Kamasutram ("Vatsyayana's Aphorisms on Love"). Tradition holds that the author was a celibate scholar. He is believed to have lived sometime between the 1st to 6th centuries AD, probably during the great cultural flowering of the Gupta period.

Kama Sutra - Preceding history

• The earliest text of the Kama Shastra tradition, said to have contained a vast amount of information, is attributed to Nandi the sacred bull, Shiva's doorkeeper, who was moved to sacred utterance by overhearing the lovemaking of the god and his wife Parvati.
• During the 8th century BC, Shvetaketu, son of Uddalaka, produced a summary of Nandi's work. However this "summary" was still too vast to be accessible.
• A scholar called Babhravya, together with a group of his disciples, produced a summary of Shvetaketu's summary. This remained a huge and encyclopaedic tome.
• Between the 3rd and 1st centuries BC, several authors reproduced different parts of the Babhravya group's work in various specialist treatises. Among the authors, those whose names are known are Charayana, Ghotakamukha, Gonardiya, Gonikaputra, Suvarnanabha, and Dattaka:

• Yashodhara, in his commentary of Kama Sutra, attributes the origin of erotic science to Mallanaga, the "prophet of the Asuras", meaning it originated in prehistoric times. Nandi is then said to have transcribed it for mankind. The attribution of the name "Mallanaga" to Vatsyayana is due to the confusion of his role as editor of the Kama Sutra with that of the mythical creator of erotic science.

Kama Sutra - Time and background of Kama Sutra

Vatsyayana seems to have lived around the 4th century AD, at a time of cultural prosperity known as the Gupta period. The fact that Varaha Mihira in his Brihad Samhita (around the 6th century AD) claims to have drawn his inspirations from the Kama Sutra, and the Kama Sutra's mention of King Shatakarni Shatavahana who lived in the 1st century BC gives the ranges for the possible production time of the Kama Sutra.

Vatsyayana claims the various major works of Kama Shastra had become difficult to access, which is why he undertook to collect and summarize them in Kama Sutra.

Kama Sutra - Translations

The most widely known English translation of the Sutra is that of Sir Richard Francis Burton and Frederick Foster Arbuthnot in 1883. An influential recent translation is that of Indra Sinha, published in 1980. It was translated again in 2002 by the controversial Wendy Doniger (professor of the history of religions at the University of Chicago) and Sudhir Kakar (Indian psychoanalyst and senior fellow at Center for Study of World Religions at Harvard).

See also

• Kama
• Sutra
• Kamashastra (Kamasutra is said to have originated from Kamashastra)

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Kama Sutra", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki