Social Life in Ancient India: Studies in Vatsyayana's Kamasutra c5.s1.6

c5.s1.6

courtesans of Pāṭaliputra, wrote a separate treatise dealing with the *Vaiśika* section of Bābhravya. His example was followed by six other writers—Cārāyaṇa, Suvarṇanābha, Ghoṭakamukha, Gonardīya, Goṇikāputra and Kucumāra, each of whom took up a section of Bābhravya and wrote a monograph on it. As the science treated in this fragmentary fashion by numerous writers was about to be mangled and spoiled and as the work of Bābhravya, being huge in bulk, was difficult to be mastered, Vātsyāyana proposes to give an epitome of the whole subject in a single work of moderate dimensions. Towards the end of the Kāmasūtra, again, Vātsyāyana says that having mastered the significance of the *sūtras* of Bābhravya (from his teachers, as one would do in the case of a sacred text or *āgama*) and having pondered over them in his mind, he composed the Kāmasūtra in the approved method.¹ He thus admits that the great work of Bābhravya formed the groundwork of his own book as is also quite evident from the frequent references that he makes to it in every part of his Kāmasūtra : one out of his seven sections, the *Sāmprayogika*, covering about a fourth part of the whole work, is entirely taken from Bābhravya, as he says at the end of that section.² There can, therefore, be no doubt that Vātsyāyana had before him the great work of Bābhravya Pāñcāla. The commentator also quotes several verses stating the opinions of the followers of Bābhravya, and about a *sūtra* of Vātsyāyana he observes that it is a verse of