The internet is full of lists of the "best" Kama Sutra positions. Most of them lift the same handful of exotic-sounding names, illustrate them with generic drawings, and rank them by novelty. That is not what "best" means in the classical text itself.
What Vatsyayana actually calls best
When the Kama Sutra recommends one arrangement over another, its criteria are consistent throughout the book. A "best" position, for Vatsyayana, is one that:
- is comfortable for both partners over an unhurried period of time;
- allows both partners to see each other's face and mood;
- suits the phase of the relationship and the emotional tone of the evening;
- can be entered into and left calmly, without hurry or effort.
What is missing from this list is telling: novelty, difficulty, athleticism, "advanced" status. Vatsyayana is not writing for a competitive audience.
The classical short list
If we ask which arrangements the Kama Sutra itself returns to most often, a short list emerges:
- The Clasping. A face-to-face position associated with settled partnerships and unhurried encounters. Vatsyayana treats it as the ordinary case.
- The Lotus. A seated, symmetrical position drawn from the imagery of the lotus flower. Recommended when both partners want a slow, meditative pace.
- The Side Position. Both partners on their sides, face-to-face. Vatsyayana notes its usefulness for long, quiet evenings.
- The Widely Opened. A more energetic face-to-face arrangement.
- The Congress of the Cow. A rear-entry position given a single, discreet paragraph in the text.
Why the emphasis on comfort
The classical text takes the view that intimate life is a lifelong practice, not a set of one-off events. Positions that are exhausting or awkward do not sustain a partnership. Positions that are comfortable and attentive do. Vatsyayana's own recommendations lean, quietly but consistently, toward the second kind.
Positions for the beginning of a relationship
Vatsyayana explicitly reserves certain more elaborate arrangements for practised partners. For the early phase of a relationship he recommends the simplest, most face-to-face arrangements, on the grounds that partners who are still learning each other's rhythms benefit from being able to see each other clearly.
Positions for a long partnership
For the long phase of a settled partnership, Vatsyayana recommends variety, but variety of tone and pacing, not variety of acrobatics. A change of pace, he suggests, will refresh a relationship more reliably than a change of arrangement.
What the modern reader might take away
The "best" Kama Sutra positions, in the spirit of the text itself, are the ones that let two partners give each other their full and unhurried attention. This is a considerably older and considerably wiser view than the modern list-making tradition suggests.
A note on the sixty-four
The famous "sixty-four" of popular Kama Sutra discussion is not, in Vatsyayana's book, a number of positions. It is drawn partly from the sixty-four arts of the cultivated adult (Book One) and partly from the elaborate classifications of later medieval Sanskrit erotic manuals. There is nothing in the classical Kama Sutra that asks a modern reader to work through a set of sixty-four exercises.
Next steps
For the broader argument, return to the main Tesro resource. Two adjacent pages that develop related material are Positions List and Poses. For the editorial framework, see About, Editorial Standards, Regulation & Compliance and Publishers & Operators.