Kamasutra
Kamasutra
Pleasure (kama) is a legitimate goal of a well-lived life on equal footing with duty and wealth, and erotic and social skill can and should be studied systematically rather than left to instinct.
- pleasure (kama) as a legitimate goal alongside duty and wealth
- systematic study of courtship and eroticism as a shastra discipline
- the urban leisured citizen (nagaraka) as its intended reader
- textual survival dependent on Yashodhara's later commentary
A compact treatise of roughly 1,250 prose-and-verse sutras on erotic and social life for the urban, leisured citizen (nagaraka), covering courtship, marriage, adultery, courtesans, and sexual technique, framed by the broader claim that pleasure is one of the three legitimate aims of life alongside dharma and artha. It draws structurally on the earlier statecraft and technical-manual (shastra) tradition, and survives largely intelligible only because of a single 13th-century commentary by Yashodhara. Its opening book lists sixty-four auxiliary arts, from music and dance to perfumery and word games, that a cultured citizen of either sex was expected to cultivate, treating eroticism as continuous with a broader education in refined urban living rather than as a separate, purely physical subject. Pataliputra is only a traditional association; Vatsyayana's actual location is unknown.
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