The Complete Kama Sutra summary

What are the aims of life?

If you ask Vātsyāyana, he will say they are threefold: virtue, wealth, and love – all of which you should aim to keep in perfect harmony. But the author’s particular concern is with kama: love, or, more broadly, the pleasures of the senses – of sight, taste, smell, and of course touch.

How does a man find his beloved? The Kama Sutra, mostly written from the male perspective, is full of detail on matchmaking.

The ideal partner for an eligible bachelor like the one just described is young, well-born, well-educated, and a virgin. It’s best if a couple has matching interests and similar levels of wealth.

The most famous section of the Kama Sutra is the one that describes sex. Daniélou translates its title as “Amorous Advances.”

It’s detailed and sometimes surprising, and we’ll take it step by step – just like those amorous young newlyweds. Many details don’t quite match the values and mores of modern life and love, but the Kama Sutra still contains plenty of reminders of just how little we’ve changed in almost two millennia.

The number of words the Kama Sutra devotes to listing sexual positions is small – but it’s these words that have forged the book’s reputation, aided by countless illustrations made over the centuries.

This is also one of the sections of the book that makes the most sense to us today. Chewing betel leaf and playing games with pebbles have not endured so well through the ages. The human body, however, is much the same now as it was then.

The Kama Sutra is intended as a manual to be studied – but it isn’t a moral guidebook. So it carefully indexes a wide range of sexual practices that it doesn’t necessarily advocate. Its aim is simply to be complete. That said, it’s not easy to tell just which practices are and aren’t permissible.

Sex with multiple women, for instance, is discussed, and readers are told that it’s fine so long as the women involved are fond of each other. In certain circumstances – for instance, with the wives of a king – women having sex with multiple men is also common.

Back in the days of the Kama Sutra, a wife was expected to do most of the work around the house – just as she was until quite recently. She was responsible for cleaning and gardening, and she had to present herself elegantly at all times.

Her responsibilities even extended to being polite toward her husband’s other wives, if he decided to take them. On the other hand, if her husband was unsatisfactory, she could leave him or simply have an affair.