Sunday, May 6, 2007

Kamasutram

Kamasutram, generally known to the Western world as Kama Sutra, is an ancient Indian text on human sexual behavior, widely considered to be the standard work on love in Sanskrit literature. The text was composed by Vatsyayana, as a brief summary of various earlier works belonging to a tradition known generically as Kama Shastra.
Kama is literally desire. Sutra signifies a thread, or discourse threaded on a series of aphorisms. Sutra was a standard term for a technical text, thus also the Yogasutram of Patanjali. The text is originally known as Vatsyayana Kamasutram (”Vatsyayana’s Aphorisms on Love”).
Tradition holds that the author was a celibate scholar. He is believed to have lived sometime between the 1st to 6th centuries C.E., probably during the great cultural flowering of the Gupta period. The Kama Sutra has 36 chapters, organized into seven parts, each of which are written by individual experts in the respective fields. These fields show different sex hints, positions and points of view.
The parts are: (5 chapters) - on love in general and its place in the lives of men and women
(10 chapters) - an in-depth discussion of kissing, various types of foreplay, orgasm, a list of sex positions, oral sex (in both heterosexual and homosexual context), anal sex, paraphilia, and ménage à trois.

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