Social Life in Ancient India: Studies in Vatsyayana's Kamasutra c8.s9.1

c8.s9.1

We have thus seen that the *nagaraka* was a man of considerable intellectual culture and aesthetic refinement, but at the same time he was not very scrupulous with regard to sexual morality. He is the product of an age when wealth and riches were flowing into India through an extensive commerce with the east and the west and the picture that the *Kāmasūtra* furnishes of his life also shows the virtues and vices characteristic of such an age. In the first place we observe that this materialistic prosperity had led to the formation in the country of materialistic ideals that made more of the comforts of the world than of *dharma* or the life of discipline. There are people, says Vātsyāyana, who hold that the *dharmas* should not be practised, in as much as the fruits of such practice,—the rewards for these austerities, are only prospective, and moreover they are doubtful and uncertain at the best; who but a fool would give away to others, what he has in his own hands, in the hope of some future gain? Better a dove to-day than a peacock to-morrow. Better a copper token (*kārṣāpaṇa*) that is certain than a piece of sterling gold—a *niṣka*—the acquisition of which is doubtful. Vātsyāyana, of course, combats these ideas, but it shows that the materialistic ideals of pleasure are there in the country, though limited only to a small section of the people, mostly to the Laukāyatikas or materialists.¹