The Kama Sutra is a Sanskrit treatise on kama, desire, sensory pleasure and the art of living well with another person. It was composed in India around the third to fifth century CE by a sage traditionally identified as Mallanaga Vatsyayana. Although its reputation in the modern West is almost entirely built on its treatment of intimate positions, that material occupies only one of the book's seven parts.
A one-sentence answer
The Kama Sutra is an ancient Indian guidebook, in Sanskrit, to a cultured adult life, including but not limited to intimate relationships between partners.
Why the book has seven parts
Vatsyayana was working within a very old Indian tradition of arranging knowledge in numbered chapters. His seven books cover, in order: an introduction to the subject; the physical union of partners; the courtship and marriage of a wife; the duties and rights of a wife; the relations between men and other men's wives; the customs of the courtesans of the day; and finally a short book of practical recipes and cosmetic recommendations. Only one of the seven — the second, is about physical positions.
The word "kama"
Kama is one of the four purusharthas or aims of Hindu life. The others are dharma (moral duty), artha (worldly success) and moksha (spiritual liberation). The four are not in conflict. A well-arranged life, in this tradition, honours all of them. Vatsyayana's book is a manual for the third aim, but he is careful, throughout, to place kama within the wider frame.
What "sutra" means
A sutra, literally a "thread," is a compressed teaching statement. The Kama Sutra is written in short, aphoristic verses of exactly this kind, with commentary and elaboration filling out the surrounding prose. The most influential premodern commentary is the Jayamangala by Yashodhara, written some centuries after the main text.
Is the book a religious text?
No. The Kama Sutra assumes the general worldview of classical Hinduism, but it is not scripture. It is closer in genre to what a modern reader would call a manual of manners, philosophy of life, and applied psychology, all under a single cover.
What the book is famous for, and what it actually says
Vatsyayana's treatise is famous for a numbered catalogue of intimate positions. That catalogue is real. In Book Two, Vatsyayana lists and categorises positions and enumerates them by name, the Lotus, the Congress of the Cow, the Rising Position and so on. Later medieval writers, especially the authors of the Ratirahasya and the Ananga Ranga, expanded the list. In the classical Kama Sutra itself, however, the tone is analytical rather than pictorial. Positions are grouped by principle: by the compatibility of partners, by the phase of a relationship, by the emotional intention of an evening together.
A cultural, adult resource — not a graphic one
Since the book is regularly reduced to a stereotype, we take particular care to present it in an adult but non-graphic way. On this site the discussion of intimate positions is descriptive and general, at the register of a mainstream wellness publication or a serious cultural essay. Nothing here is instructional pornography.
Who should read the Kama Sutra today?
Anyone interested in comparative literature, the history of ideas, Indian civilisation, or the cultural history of intimacy will find the Kama Sutra rewarding. Modern couples sometimes read it in a lightly practical spirit, using its emphasis on communication, courtesy and attention as a starting point for their own conversations. Scholars read it as a document of classical Indian urban life. Historians read it as one of the earliest surviving treatises on human desire, of a sort that Europe would not produce until many centuries later.
How to begin
Most readers begin either with a modern annotated translation, the Wendy Doniger and Sudhir Kakar translation for Oxford World's Classics is a common recommendation, or with an overview guide such as this one. The book rewards patience. It is short by modern standards, and much of its wisdom is in the arrangement of small observations rather than in dramatic passages.
Short version
Vatsyayana's treatise, in Sanskrit, book, composed in India between roughly 200 and 400 CE, that describes the courtship, marriage, sexual life and household arrangements of a cultured couple. It is written in the tradition of Hindu thought, treats desire as one of the legitimate aims of life, and remains in print in dozens of languages because its underlying assumptions about attention, respect and mutual pleasure have proved unusually portable across cultures.
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This page belongs to Tesro, our editorial resource on the classical Sanskrit treatise. Nearby you may want to read the pages on Ten Facts and Meaning. Anyone curious about how the site is written should look at the About and Editorial Standards pages, and, on the regulatory side, at Regulation & Compliance and Publishers & Operators.