Believe it or not, it’s not primarily a sex manual.

The Kama Sutra, believed to have been written during the second or third century CE by the Hindu Vedic philosopher Vatsyayana, is a guide to a virtuous life, full of aphorisms on the nature of love and the importance of family life. It talks about finding a life partner and creating a harmonious relationship, navigating the challenges of extramarital affairs, balancing family and duty and the need to earn a living, as well as a variety of sexual intercourse positions.

“Sutra” in Sanskrit means treatise; “Kama” refers to desire, pleasure or sex. Thus: Treaty of desire/pleasure/sex. For Vatsyayana, however, desire/pleasure/sex has a different meaning than it does for us world-weary moderns overly familiar with commodified sex. Desire, pleasure, and sex in the Kama Sutra are contextualized, seen as part of a worldview in which men and women dance together in the arts of love and in families and larger networks of relationships.

The target audience for the text was the wealthy male city dweller in the sophisticated civilization of North India. Hanif Kureishi, reviewing a recent translation in The Guardian, wrote that the Kama Sutra is “…a sexual self-help manual for the socially naive, a way for geeks to make it with girls.” So, more than a sacred text, it is more like a compendium of advice for a young man from a wise and worldly uncle.

British explorer Sir Richard Burton first introduced the Kama Sutra to the West, in a translation he privately sponsored and printed in 1883. This early effort, though fraught with inaccuracies, captivated generations of readers with its seemingly exotic approach to sexual intercourse The frankness with which the book discussed sexual matters was refreshing to those confronting the institutionalized sexual repression of Christian cultures.

Since Burton’s time, the Kama Sutra has been used as a shorthand way of referring to exotic eroticism. The sections of the book that describe sexual positions have come to represent the entire book, with numerous books (and movies) published featuring photogenic models performing these positions for our edification. It turns out that even ancient texts can be broken down and used in simplistic ways to fuel the modern yearning for sexual fulfillment. But we moderns have it the other way around: sexual wholeness is not achieved by abstracting the “good parts” from a wise guide to life that has the patina of age. Vatsyayana’s work places this embedded sexuality in the context of loving and respectful relationships with clear boundaries.

The first complete modern translation of the Kama Sutra was by the noted Indian scholar Alain Danielou, published in 1994. This fluent and literal translation from the full Sanskrit original includes excerpts from two commentaries and helps the reader to understand much about the cultural context of the book. .

In 2009, Wendy Doniger, a Hindu scholar at the University of Chicago, published a new translation using clear, vivid, and sexually frank English. In the Introduction, Doniger, one of the world’s foremost Sanskrit scholars, describes the history of the Kama Sutra and places it in the context of early Indian social theory, scientific method, and sexual ethics.

Vatsyayana summarizes his approach to the Kama Sutra in a wise postscript (Doniger trans.):

Vatsyayana did this work in chastity and in the highest meditation,

For the sake of worldly life;

he didn’t compose it

For the sake of passion.

The man well instructed and expert in this text

Pay attention to religion and power;

He does not give himself too much to passion,

And so he does when he plays the role of a lover.