The Kama Sutra is one of the most frequently referenced books in the world and one of the least frequently read. That gap has generated a small industry of confident misinformation. This page corrects the ten mistakes most often made about it.
1. It is not exclusively a manual of sexual positions
Only Book Two (one of seven) is devoted to positions. The other six books cover courtship, marriage, household life, professional life and the daily manners of a cultured adult. The famous chapter is a minority of the whole.
2. It does not describe sixty-four positions
The famous "sixty-four" comes partly from the sixty-four arts of a cultivated adult (listed in Book One) and partly from later medieval erotic manuals. The classical Kama Sutra itself does not enumerate sixty-four positions.
3. It was not written by an anonymous poet
The traditional author is Mallanaga Vatsyayana. Very little is known about him personally, but he identifies himself in the text and describes his editorial method.
4. It is much older than most people think
Composed in Sanskrit somewhere between the second and fifth centuries CE. It is roughly seventeen hundred years old.
5. It is not a religious text
It assumes the general worldview of classical Hinduism, but it is not scripture, not a book of ritual, not a manual of devotion. It is closer to a secular philosophy of manners.
6. It is not the same as tantra
Tantra is a family of religious traditions that developed later. It shares some Sanskrit vocabulary with the Kama Sutra but has different aims and methods.
7. The English translation is younger than the reputation suggests
The first widely circulated English translation was published in 1883, by Sir Richard Burton and Forster Fitzgerald Arbuthnot, with Indian collaborators. Everything the general English reader "knows" about the Kama Sutra derives, directly or indirectly, from that translation and its successors.
8. The Burton translation is not the most accurate
The current standard English translation is the Oxford World's Classics edition by Wendy Doniger and Sudhir Kakar (2002). It is more faithful to the Sanskrit than Burton's Victorian rendering, and comes with a substantial modern introduction.
9. It is not principally a book about acrobatics
The Kama Sutra's tone is measured and analytical. Its recurring theme is attention and timing, and shared pleasure. The exotic positions of popular imagination are not the point of the text.
10. It has survived because it says something durable
The reason the Kama Sutra is still in print in dozens of languages is not the novelty of its positions. It is the durability of its underlying claim: that desire and care, along with attention and respect belong together, and that a life which takes all four seriously is a richer life than one which does not.
A bonus fact
In its own society, the book was, a mainstream book. It was not written to shock. It was written to organise and preserve an existing tradition of adult thought about desire. Its reputation as a scandalous document is a modern accretion, largely Victorian in origin, and is worth setting aside before a first reading.
Where to go from here
The natural next click is the main Tesro resource, which sets each of these individual pages in its wider context. On either side of this one you will find Modern Relationships and What Is Kama Sutra. If you have questions about the site itself rather than the text, look at About, Editorial Standards, Regulation & Compliance or Publishers & Operators.