By PLS*
Once upon a time, around 1700 years ago, there was a very smart guy in India named Vatsyayana. He wrote, in Sanskrit, about sex or pleasure or desire or love, depending on how you want to translate kama. More to the point, he tells how to seduce, swooningly please and keep a lover. Sexual anxiety has been around for a long time. Sexual fantasies, too.
Like Kinsey and Freud and other Westerners who wrote about sometimes yummy, sometimes scummy sex, Vatsyayana used an academic facade like a condom to protect himself from criticism on the grounds of prurience and pornography. He was writing a sutra aka treatise, and he studded it with references and deferences to this scholar and that commentator. If footnotes are lacking, it's only because they hadn't been invented yet. (A terrific introduction to a recent translation by Western scholars makes up for that.)
Or maybe we should imagine Vatsyayana as the Hugh Hefner of his time, hiding behind the hottest scholarship to help wealthy idle playboys gratify their itches. Borrowing, in a way, from religion, too. Go to any museum of Asian art and take a look at ancient and medieval Indian sculpture. Better yet, go to the temples of Khajuraho or Konarak. Nymphs with bustlines even Dolly Parton would envy. Erections to put a mere ruler to shame. Nipple pinching. Creative groping. Group sex. And most sculpted, officially, to depict the sphere of the gods and goddesses 
and their passionate devotees. And don't forget to check out the paintings and palm leaf manuscripts. As often as not, you can have your frissons and be spiritual, too. In your imagination anyway, which is good enough, most of the time, for most of us.
Actually ancient India had more than its share of intellectuals like Vatsyayana. One of the earliest mathematical treatises came from India, along with the invention of the zero, which I'll take the liberty of calling a yoni, or a female symbol, for present purposes. (Guess what the 1 becomes then?) So it's hardly surprising that, for Vatsyayana, sex is like a logical or mathematical game, an exhaustive matrix of possibilities and combinations to keep the beloved from becoming jaded, bored, unresponsive, ready for a change of face and phallus.
At one point Vatsyayana speaks of 84 varieties of sex. Later he speaks of permutations of nine. The two don't quite match, it seems to me, but the habit of mind is clear and culturally persistent, it seems. Have you ever wondered why modern Indians are so good at math and science and software design? But I digress. Here are some more numbers.
There are four kinds of embraces, says Vatsyayana: the twining vine, climbing-the-tree, rice-and-sesame and milk-and-water. There are also four ways of bringing bodies together: touching, stabbing, grinding and pressing. We must also consider the potential of scratching, biting and kissing, the latter of which consists of three modes: casual, throbbing and brushing. Etc. Etc. Etc. This is sex as a series of to-do lists.
Meanwhile, there are eight kinds of vocalization during the sex act: screaming, whimpering, groaning, babbling, crying, panting, shrieking and sobbing. To wit, the performance you suffer through when you're trying to get to sleep in hotels that haven't invested in soundproof walls. Vatsyayana knew every sound and syllable.
But first the playboy has to get his lover into bed, and Vatsyayana has hints for placating (or deceiving) one's own wife (or wives) while seducing (successfully and without undue scandal) women of every possible status, including: virgins, courtesans or used women, other men's wives. More matrices. Or should I say mattresses? Followed by advice about how to get out of liaisons when they pall. And then how to resume an affair whose premature termination one regrets! This treatise is nothing if not thorough.
The Kamasutra is purely about the pursuit, heightening and prolonging of sensual pleasure, for males and females (the female part being pretty extraordinary back then in India and largely unthinkable in the West until fairly close to our own time). It's not about morality. It's not even about sentimentality and romance, according to Sanskritists Wendy Doniger (University of Chicago) and Sudhir Kakar (Harvard), who have written a very engaging introduction to their fine recent translation, which has been published in full by Oxford University Press. There's also a cute palm-sized collection of excerpts that would make a charming little valentine for non-prudish prospects or partners. Although this version is far from exhaustive, even it presents some interesting challenges for those who have fantasies of uniting exotically.
Warning: many of these entwinings are more likely to lead to hysterical laughter than to orgasm.
Why? Let's consider ordinary yoga, another Indian contribution. There are the asanas most of us can do: the downward dog, the cobra, a warrior pose or two and maybe even a headstand, with or without the assistance of a wall. And then there are the weird contortions demonstrated by lean, smooth-skinned swamis in loincloths, the sort of pretzeling and balancing that belongs strictly on the roster of today's X-treme sports.
And, while I'm on the pitfalls of praxis, here's a bit of advice. Despite Vatsyayana's submersive suggestion, don't bother to try anything elegant in hot water. Some personal experiments in a lovely Japanese bath in Kyoto were extremely unsuccessful. As for cold water, who could stay in long enough to assume such complex postures? And then there's the decidedly unseductive danger of goose bumps.
But don't despair. Vatsyayana makes room for invention and spontaneity. In speaking of the joys and varieties of scratching (tiger's claw, peacock's foot, hare's leap, lotus leaf), he quotes "scholars" who say,
because the things people can imagine are infinite, and there are infinite kinds of dexterity, and one can learn anything by practice and repetition, and passion is at the very heart of cutting with the nails [that's scratching, again], who could survey all the forms?Not even Vatsyayana, it seems, who adds: "For even passion demands variety."
In the end, then, Kamasutra isn't a textbook so much as an inspiration.
*With apologies (and thanks) to Wendy Doniger, Mircea Eliade Distinguished Service Professor of the History of Religions at the University of Chicago, with whom I took and thoroughly enjoyed a course in "Sanskrit Literature in Translation" the year before I joined the foreign service.
Illustrations: reclining lovers from cover of Oxford editions; detail of pointing couple from a portfolio of Bundi Painting published by the Lalit Kala Akademi, New Delhi.