One of the world's most misunderstood literary works, Vatsyayana's Kamasutra is actually an ancient acknowledgement of holistic living

The Kamasutra of Vatsyayana is the product of a civilization that had set out to understand human life in all its expressions. The nature of desire and its workings was one of its fundamental inquiries. The quest of pleasure and happiness was always acknowledged to be the spring of all human actions.

Sukh, or 'pleasure and happiness', which includes sexual pleasure, was a subject of inquiry in the major Upanishads. At least 40 long chapters are devoted to it in the Mahabharata. And it is there, long before Vatsyayana composed his Kamasutra, that the human sexual impulse is investigated systematically.

But there was in all this a certain method of understanding that must be understood first. Of the many attributes of that understanding, we need concentrate mainly on four. Firstly, every person wants to understand experience, and not just go through it without making sense. Understanding is therefore experiential and not merely intellectual.

The problem, however, is that: one, we generally see experience as something happening to us, rarely seeing that every person is also an active creator of his, or her, experience. Thus, self-understanding is the first step towards meaning. Two, we tend to fragment one experience from another, and then seek to understand each; which, of course, is impossible. The attributes of a human being are interrelated in such a way that one flows into the other, and can be understood only in its togetherness. That is to say, the first step towards pleasure and happiness is to experience oneself in one's inner togetherness, and not as a fragmented being.

Secondly, therefore, the method is to show the natural inner unity of human attributes. The physical body is not separated from the mind; nor are they separated from emotions and feelings. In their integral togetherness, they constitute the life force, or prana. Neither is man separate from nature; for the five elements of nature are already within him as the generative parts of his physical and mental being. Thus, the material and the spiritual are not two separate domains.

The physical and the material, as forms of energy, are spiritual, and therefore equally worthy of reverence. The human body is as sacred as the spirit. This is the clearly stated position of the Upanishads-the first human striving towards understanding the self as the world, and the world as the self.

Thirdly, the method is to show that life is to be understood and lived paradoxically. For human life is paradoxical. The paradox of pleasure is that unrestrained pleasure kills itself. In other words, self-restraint is the first condition of pleasure. The paradox of intimacy is that distance is its first condition. The intimacy in which there is no distance, turns very soon either into resentment or even into hatred.

The paradox of sexual pleasure is that all those conditions that create sexual pleasure and happiness lie outside sexuality. The paradox of self-interest is that the only way of serving one's self-interest is to serve the interest of the other: that is to say, the pleasure and the happiness of the other is an essential condition of one's own pleasure and happiness. The paradox of self is that without the other, the self will be inconceivable. And, above all, there is the paradox of limits, which consists of the fact that one becomes aware of one's limits only by transgressing them.

If we read the Kamasutra of Vatsyayana in the light of the four main attributes of the Indian method of understanding the human condition briefly sketched above, we will get a very different picture of that work than what we would without them.Indeed, with their light we will have a radically different perspective on human sexuality.

To the author of the Kamasutra, the body is as sacred as the spirit; sexuality in all its concrete forms as worthy of reverence as the spiritual. They flow into each other, as energy, to create the joy of life. To separate the two, under the wholly erroneous notion that one is gross and the other refined, one at a lower and the other at a higher level of consciousness, is from the very start to do violence to human worth, and thus do violence to one's self. Joy is not to be separated from reverence under the stupid notion that one is frivolous and the other solemn.

It will be equally erroneous to separate the physicality of sex from the erotic. Without the erotic, the physicality of sex is empty. To the body belong the sensations, to the mind and heart, feelings and emotions and sensibility. Sexuality, for Vatsyayana, in order to be experienced and not just sensed for a little while, is suffused with the erotic, which will be the proper translation of the word kama, or desire.

The attributes of being a person, in being a natural unity, express the erotic in combination with the rest, and not in isolation. The togetherness of man and woman in a wholesome relationship requires first of all a wholesome relationship with one's own self, in which any one human attribute is not wrenched from the others and made the sole basis of one's life. The art of making love would require, even in its own terms, cultivation of a much wider area of sensibility, such as music, dance, poetry, literature.

In some ways the distinctions he makes are perfectly sound, and obvious. For example, as everybody knows, so many marriages have invited great unhappiness, and are often wrecked, because of the unequal nature of feelings and emotions and passions. Vatsyayana is thoroughly realistic in advising that one should mate with one's own type, of temperament and feeling, and also physical make-up. The unresolved problem, however, is, which he does not mention, that there is no way in which that can be adequately pre-determined. One can know that one has been matched wrongly only after one has been wrongly matched.
Therefore, what it is also saying is that the texts on kama "are of help only till passion is not excited: but once the wheel of passion starts to roll, there is then no shastra and no order". And yet, there is order. It is that of self-restraint, which is an essential condition of fulfilling sexual passion. Another form of order is in knowing what to do and when.

Above all, Vatsyayana says: "At all times, the man must carefully observe every action of the woman he loves, and so gauge her passion and preferences, and act accordingly, to give her the greatest pleasure." Nothing is to be hurried; nothing is tobe forced.

The most remarkable characteristic of the Kamasutra is its attitude of equality between man and woman in matters of erotic love. That attitude is inherent already in the word sam-bhoga, ordinarily translated as 'sexual intercourse', which completely misses the true import of the original Sanskrit word sam-bhoga, meaning 'enjoying together, enjoying in harmony'.

Vatsyayana repeatedly says that reciprocity is absolutely essential to the joys of love. He says: "Every lover must reciprocate the beloved's gesture with equal intensity, kiss by kiss and embrace by embrace. If there is no reciprocity, the beloved will feel dejected and consider the lover as a stone-pillar. It will result in a highly unsatisfactory union. To keep the passion alive and inflamed, reciprocity is absolutely essential."

In brief, where there is only taking, there is also the loneliness of the innermost.