What the Kama Sutra Can Teach You About Love

A hundred years ago, an ideal form of love was supposed to bind men and women. Married love was blessed as long as it had no genitals. The eminent Victorian writer John Ruskin, who learned about female anatomy from Greek statues, ran from the bridal chamber in horror when he discovered on his honeymoon that his wife had pubic hair. Sweaty, undignified sex was not accepted as an aspect of ideal love -- in the guise of carnal lust, sex all but killed idealism. Shakespeare himself lamented sex as "the expense of spirit in a waste of shame."

This ugly belief system persists today. Fundamentalist Christians convinced that sex repeats original sin would be surprised to find themselves in agreement with New Age followers of Eastern religion for whom purity and celibacy are also the ideal way to approach sex. Avoid it if you can, indulge if you must. In secular circles, the great sexual bugaboo is disease, for when sin went out the window, the specter of STDs came in, and today's school children are hit with horror stories of what can happen if they take even a single sexual misstep. Almost the only echo of the sane regard for pleasure displayed in that celebrated, ancient Indian text, the Kama Sutra (Inner Traditions International, 1995), comes in men's magazines, where the fantasy side of sex is indulged in completely -- and we must nod toward the feminist movement for allowing women's magazines their own brand of runaway fantasy.

Elsewhere sex is talked about incessantly, but the results are very confused. In my experience, what couples want is a way out of this confusion. Having tried sex much earlier and more freely than any previous generation, they wonder what it really means. After your 1000th orgasm, is sex as worn out as anything else? Why hasn't it revealed the hidden glory of another person, or of yourself? I think the Kama Sutra shows a way out of this dark maze -- or at least it points the way.

The Kama Sutra is many things: a manual for lovemaking, a marital aid sneaked furtively into many a bedroom, and to prudes throughout the ages, a scandal. Can it also be described as an inspiring spiritual text? I strongly believe it can, because the truth about sex, and love in general, is that it remains the most powerful spiritual experience that most of us will have in our lifetimes.

What is it like to be in love? You feel accepted and understood. You feel more complete, as if an invisible presence is filling you up. You imagine that you can do anything -- life is suddenly open to all possibilities. You experience ecstasy in ordinary things: a glance, the touch of a hand, light falling on your beloved's face. Your self is expanded far beyond the petty limitations that were so confining before you fell in love.

I could catalog many more shifts in awareness that lovers experience, but they all have one thing in common: They mirror exactly the transcendent state of the greatest saints and sages. In spiritual terms, you are not deluding yourself when you fall in love. You are seeing yourself as you truly are.

The Kama Sutra can be read, first, as an antidote to shame. It celebrates carnality, making it a part of life to be seen in the clear light of day. The title is sometimes translated as "Aphorisms on Love," but a better English version would be "Instructions on Pleasure." Sex is unadulterated pleasure when you enter the world of the Kama Sutra. The sexual organs are called "the organs of pleasure." As such, they are not considered shameful any more than the tongue is shameful because it brings the delights of eating.

The pundit Vatsyayana, who wrote the Kama Sutra, is blessedly free of physical disgust, but he isn't naïve. He understands lust -- he depicts the stages of erotic obsession in great detail. For example, he gives the stages of romance: making eye contact, exchanging longing glances, having erotic images come to mind that won't go away, followed by thinking of the beloved all the time, losing sleep, making excuses to meet, and finally culminating -- if sexual contact is denied -- with falling sick and dying.

The whole history of the romantic novel is written in those few observations. If you smile at the notion that sexual desire can make someone grow sick and die, you may be correct medically, but millions have wept over the death of Catherine Earnshaw pining for Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights, not to mention a thousand knights languishing for love in medieval romances.

Vatsya knows what it feels like to covet your neighbor's wife; in fact, he gives detailed instructions on what to do in that situation. (Not that he condones it -- in one place he forbids going through with it unless you have reached the stage of growing sick from desire and might die.) In many ways his audience was looking for common-sense sex advice, and we find that in abundance. For example, he lists reasons why a married woman might turn down the advances of another man.

This is not a dusty old text; most of the time, the Kama Sutra feels contemporary. Vatsya doesn't say that cheating is a sin, forbidden by God. He doesn't think that way, even though he lived as a monk. He tells us, in fact, that he wrote his book while in a state of "deep contemplation of God." But despite his frequent recourse to Holy Writ -- meaning the accumulation of thousands of years of spiritual documents, many of which are now lost -- Vatsya is refreshingly liberal, astonishingly so for his time. He has no qualms about premarital sex; he constantly advises men to pay attention to the desires of women. In fact, despite the social milieu which granted women no real equality, in the bedroom, Vatsya insists that the playing field is even. Nor does he take a subtle route to misogyny by turning women into femmes fatales -- to him, every desire is legitimate, no matter which gender has that desire, and all are equally entitled to find fulfilment. There is not a breath of social feminism in this book, in that men are seen to be the superior sex, but sexual feminism couldn't look to a better place to find its origins.

Modern India is praised for at long last starting to catch up with the technologies of the West, and it has become commonplace to hear an Indian accent on the other end of the line when we call about our credit-card bill. Yet in some ways, the old India far outstripped the new, only to be ignored in those areas where the greatest value lies. (One must remember that today's India is a country where the movie censors forbid onscreen kissing.) Old India had a vision of life, one so complete that no activity was divorced from it, including sex.

The Kama Sutra is a spiritual text because it encourages self discovery. Until sex is part of your complete self -- including your spiritual self -- you do not truly understand who you are.