Social Life in Ancient India: Studies in Vatsyayana's Kamasutra c5.s2.43

c5.s2.43

Coming down to still later times, we observe that Vātsyāyana quotes from the *Mahābhāshya* of Patañjali. The latter observes with regard to unavoidable faults or defects in grammatical definitions, that simply because certain defects cannot be avoided, one should certainly not desist from formulating rules of interpretation (*paribhāshās*) or from giving a definition, just as one does not refrain from cooking his food merely because there are beggars to ask for a share of it, nor from sowing barley-grains simply for the reason that when the plants grow up there my be deer to destroy the corn. Vātsyāyana says the very same thing in exactly the same language with regard to defects inherent in *Kāma* or desire.¹ This quotation from the *Mahābhāshya* brings down the upper limit of the date of Vātsyāyana to the second half of the second century B.C., in round numbers to circa 150 B.C.