Social Life in Ancient India: Studies in Vatsyayana's Kamasutra c8.s9.16

c8.s9.16

There can be no doubt, then, that this age of great philosophical discovery and analysis, the age that produced the Lalitavistara and the code of Yājñavalkya, could not have been marked by a general low tone in moral life. The age to be studied as a whole requires a study of all sides of the Indian civilisation of the time based on a far ampler stock of materials than only Vātsyāyana can supply. Vātsyāyana's work deals with only one aspect of it and shows that his was an age of great intellectual activity in all directions, and the great thinker makes an analysis of the erotic feelings and of the elementary relations between the sexes in a right scientific spirit : in doing so he naturally turned for illustration to the class that had cultivated this side of the humanistics for centuries, at least since the time of Pāṇini, to whom as we have seen, the nāgaraka was a familiar character. Vātsyāyana does not cast a charm over illicit love, nor does he invest it with the halo of romance. He merely gives a frank and matter of fact account of the social sore, proceeds to a masterly analysis of the psychology of the man who seeks such love—the jealousy, anger, hatred, passion, greed, selfishness that working within the brain of the human animal, cloud his judgment and pervert his tastes. He points out categorically that a scientific work (*śāstra*), dealing with a subject as a whole, must be exhaustive, but that is no reason why a particular practice described in it should be carried into effect; for example, the taste, the properties and the digestive qualities of dog's flesh are given in medical works, but that is no reason why it should be adopted as an article of diet by sober men.¹ He winds up his thesis by saying, "whenever, on account of the character of the subject dealt with, I had to speak about things that might smack of lust and desire, I have taken care immediately afterwards to censure and condemn them", and he adds that, he himself had followed the strictly pure life of a *brahmacārin* and had been deeply immersed in contemplation (*samādhi*) while composing the work for the benefit of the world and not for feeding the flames of desire. The ideal of life that he holds up, is that of harmonious blending of the three elements—*dharma*, *artha* and *kāma*—which sum up according to Indian ideas all human motives of action for the people of the world. He enjoins that a rightminded person should occupy himself with such actions as, while giving pleasure (*kāma*), do not stand in the way of the acquisition of the good things of the earth (*artha*), and at the same time do not disregard the behests of *dharma*, that is, as he explains, do not afford any ground for the fear of their being followed by evil effects hereafter. This is the same as the teaching of the *Bhagavadgītā* that God dwells in such desires as do not violate *dharma*. Vātsyāyana thus emphasises the working out of the threefold functions of man (trivarga) in such a way that there may be no conflict among these three, while he is not unmindful of the fourth or final good of mankind, viz., mokṣa,¹ the ultimate release from the limitations that curb the eternal growth of his soul.