The Kama Sutra is often read in modern popular culture as a book about technique. Its author would have been surprised. Vatsyayana is a philosopher of manners as well as a cataloguer of positions, and the underlying claims of his book are ethical, not mechanical.
The four aims of life
Classical Hindu ethics recognises four legitimate aims of a human life. They are called the purusharthas, literally, the aims of a person. In the standard order they are:
- Dharma, moral duty, the ethical shape of a life.
- Artha — worldly welfare, work, prosperity, the material conditions of a life.
- Kama, desire, sensory pleasure, delight in relationships and in the sensory world.
- Moksha, liberation, the ultimate spiritual aim.
The four are not in competition. A well-arranged life makes room for all of them. The Kama Sutra is a manual for the third aim, deliberately placed within the framework of the other three.
Why desire is a legitimate subject
Vatsyayana opens his book with a defence of his subject matter. He anticipates the objection that desire is unworthy of scholarly attention and answers it directly. Human beings, he observes, are creatures of desire whether or not they choose to study the subject; the question is only whether they will do so thoughtfully or thoughtlessly. To study kama is to bring intelligence to something that is already happening.
Just as we study duty and welfare, so we should study desire. A life which pretends to no desire is not a wise life; it is only an unexamined one.
Attention as an ethic
The most striking philosophical thread in the Kama Sutra is its emphasis on attention. Again and again Vatsyayana insists that the essential quality in a partner is the ability to notice, to see the mood of the other person, to listen for what is said and what is not said, to time an approach or a withdrawal to the actual life of the moment. A great many passages of the book that read at first glance as physical instruction are, on closer inspection, instruction in observation.
The role of self-knowledge
Vatsyayana asks his reader to know their own temperament — their pace, their preferences, their limits, before entering a partnership. He gives typologies of temperament, admittedly schematic ones, and encourages the reader to see themselves as clearly as they see the other. The philosophical point is that pleasure without self-knowledge is unstable; pleasure with self-knowledge is a form of art.
Respect for the partner
Vatsyayana's book is not a modern egalitarian document. It was written in a society with sharp gender and class hierarchies, and those hierarchies are present in the text. Yet within its own framework, Vatsyayana is unusually attentive to the partner's point of view. He warns against haste. He warns against inattention. He argues that the pleasure of one partner is not pleasure at all if the other has been ignored. Modern readers often find this thread of the book the most surprising.
Relation to tantra
Vatsyayana's book is not a tantric text. Tantric religion, which developed later, would build its own philosophy of desire on partly overlapping foundations, but the two traditions are distinct. The Kama Sutra is a secular manual of cultivated life; tantra is a religious framework in which desire is folded into a spiritual practice. Popular treatments of the two traditions sometimes blur them; scholarly work keeps them separate.
The classical worldview
Behind the Kama Sutra is a worldview in which the human being is a composite of appetites, capacities and duties, and in which the goal of a life is to bring all of these into balance. Neither austerity nor indulgence is the goal. The goal is a kind of practical wisdom, a fluency in daily life, of which intimate life is one part.
Why the philosophy still travels
The book survived and continues to be read partly because its ethical core is portable. The specific manners it describes belong to a lost civilisation; the 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 — is understandable in any culture. When modern couples read the book with profit, this is what they are hearing.
Related pages
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