Richard Burton while translating India’s Kama Sutra into English dedicated the work “To that small portion of the British public which takes enlightened interest in studying the manners and customs of the olden East”. By taking the work into English the translator was definitely confident that a great Sanskrit work such as Kama Sutra could interest a refined and enlightened minority, an intellectual aristocracy, with the highly refined manners of Indian households and social customs the work zeroes in on. Generally misunderstood to be a merely erotic work with its main theme centered on kama or love notwithstanding, the work has many other sides that credit it with an all comprehending outlook on man’s life.
When Burton’s translation was embellished by an introduction by the versatile scholar, Sardar K. M. Panikkar, the world renowned author of UNESCO’s History of Mankind, the work became the subject of every student of culture and civilization. Panikkar’s outstanding work in popularisimg Kamasutra among the academics the world across was of so immense a value that no work on the treatise on love and life became of scholars attention as Kamasutra. As any other work, Panikkar handles this one too with his usual ease and mastery of the subject. At the outset of his essay, ‘An Introduction to Vatsyayana’, Panikkar draws our attention to the statement of Vatsyayana:
The Kamasutra was composed, according to the precepts of the Holy Writ for benefit of the world by Vatsyayana while leading the life of a religious student and wholly engaged in the contemplation of the Deity.1
This in itself vouchsafes the divine purpose the work was written for, Panikkar claims. It may sound rather strange to someone who does not look to life with a holistic approach giving equal importance to its each and every aspect. But Panikkar again quote Vatsyayana:
He who is acquainted with the true principles of this science (of love) pays regard to the Dharma (religious duty), artha (worldly welfare) and kama (life of senses) and to his own experiences, as well as to the teachings of others, and does not act simply on the dictates of his desire. An act is never looked upon with for the simple reason that it is authorized by science, because it ought to be remembered that it is the intention of the science that the rules which it contains should only acted upon in particular cases … This work is not intended to be used merely as an instrument for satisfying our desire. A person, acquainted with the true principles of this science, and who observes his Dharma, Artha and Kama, and has regard to the practices of the people, is sure to obtain the mastery over his senses.2
“In short, an intelligent person, attending to Dharma and Artha, and attending to Kama also, without becoming the slave of his passions, obtains success in everything he may undertake”.
Kamasutra appears in some places as a work of prohibitions and proscriptions. The author having been much cautious of the subject he was dealing with and of the objections and condemnations the pseudo-moralists were likely to raise, says “As to the transgressions in the science of love which I have mentioned in this work [Kamasutra], on my own authority as an author, I have immediately after mentioning them, carefully censured and prohibited them”. Thus the author of Kamasutra, Panikkar says, cautions on the dos and don’ts so as to guide man on the path of Dharma. The over significance given to the spiritual aspects alone and the negligence of the sides of artha and kama might have made the author of Kamasutra think, unless the temporal side is also taken into account, the very existence of humanity would cease. Without the desire to live, the very perpetuity of humanity would be endangered. Of even the different rasas Bharata categorizes it is rati alone and not Bhakti which is capable of registering the continuity of the race. Hence the need of giving proper importance to the temporal aspects of life, especially the art of Love. This ancient saint’s effort could well be taken as a pre-emptive defense to the pseudo-modern materialist’s criticism that Indian culture is introvert and inert as to deprive man of his side of materialistic aspects.
Written in the Sutra style, using brevity to convey a heavy idea as seen in other Sutras, Vedanta Sutra of Badarayana for instance, the work is pioneering in the knowledge of Kama just as Manu in Dharma and Kautalya in Artha. If the Dharma, Artha and Kama are put together, dharma constitutes only one third of what lead to Moksha. Moksha is not attainable without Kama, and hence its inevitability which the author of Kamasutra realized well. About Kamasutra, Vatsyayana often cautions,
This work is not to be used merely as an instrument for satisfying our desires. A person acquainted with the true principles of this science, and who preserves his Dharma, Artha and Kama and has regard for the practices of the people, is sure to obtain the mastery over his senses.3
“In fact” as K. M. Panikkar pints out “the readers who approach this work in the hope of reading a pornographic book will be greatly disappointed for throughout it Vatsyayana keeps up the attitude of a moralist”. Vatsyayana in fact wrote the work with an ordinary householder in mind and he prescribe for instance how the life of a city dweller or Nagarika must be. The Hindu thinkers had it that the mundane life must be more luxurious than that of a Sanyasin. In fact they insisted a fully worldly life for a householder rather than the life of renunciation as in case of an ascetic. Hinduism was not renunciatory in its ideal life.
Another important side that makes Kamasutra notable is the importance its accords to the fair sex. Vatsyayana follows the rules of orthodoxy in his conception of an ideal wife. Her relationship with her husband according to Vatsyayana was not one of inferiority. In the house the woman should always present herself well dressed and well decked. “It is interesting to note that one of the boons which Sita received from a saint while she was sharing the exile of her husband Rama in the forest was that she would appear in his eyes at all times as if dressed with jewels, etc., as for a festive occasion”.4 An ideal society according to Vatsyayana is one wherein women are treated decently and gently. In fact as A. S. Altekar points out the cultural heights of a society could be well gauged by studying the norms it has set to behave to its women folk. She should never be kept concealed and cornered up, but be given all freedom for meeting and mingling. “Every afternoon, having dressed and decked her in a becoming manner, the parents should sent her with her female companions to sports recreations, marriage ceremonies and thus show her to advantage in society”. Even proper marriage, Vatsyayana views, is possible only where there is free social intercourse and men and women respect each other. Woman is of tender nature and she requires warmth and consideration and that he believes like Manu, the respect shown to the fair sext is pivotal of a progressive and standard society. She is not subsidiary to man to be used like furniture, a soulless entity as in Semitic religions. In fact the work gives significance to womanhood while helping men fall in line with the principles of Dharma.
The influence of Kamasutra on the sculptures of India has attracted wide attention. “To the Westerner” says Panikkar “it was formerly a matter of some curiosity why some of the most famous Hindu temples should have sexual practices of different kinds sculpted on their walls”.5 Explanation comes from the world of intelligence and philosophy regarding a highly enlightened society.
A good art emerges from the impulses and instincts of man directed by light and reason. Reason is related to two aspects of man’s being – the aesthetic and ethical, or his search for ‘Beauty’ and the search for ‘Good’, says Sri Aurobindo. Man may intensely search for beauty in the great creative arts like poetry, painting, sculpture, architecture or music. A complete and universal appreciation of beauty is surely a necessary character of a perfect individual and perfect society. The light of reason comes to correct and purge our aesthetic sense of its crudities and to lay down the laws of aesthetics, improved tastes and right knowledge. There the aesthetic sense becomes rationally discriminative in its work and enjoyment. But again this is true only in a restricted manner. Beauty is entirely different and cannot be made as if one from an inert plastic material. The creation of beauty in poetry and art does not fall within the sovereignty and sphere of the reason. “The intellect is not the poet, the artist, the creator within us; creation comes by a supra-rational influx of light” which works always by vision and inspiration”. Beauty is the divine manifestation in the physical. Supramental is the highest divine beauty manifesting in matter, and its principle and law is something inward and spiritua1.6
The highest form of art is always related to the idea of aesthetics and has always been symbolic irrespective of time and place. How to conceive the infinite was a problem to man and he designed it in the finite form in easy means to express it to the spectator. The artist looked into the infinite, the sky above and the sea around which looked from afar stood in their blueish hue. He reduced that vastness into an abstract for the worshipers of the invisible and intangible, coloured it in blue, and hence the blue image of Lord Ram or Lord Krishna which generations of Indians down the millennia continued to worship till date. Art, was no dancing courtesan of the mind, but a priestess in the God’s house commissioned to image the secret realities and hidden truths deriving from a high mystic vision. India’s art was fully symbolic. But this may appear to ordinary connoisseurs dull and boring. The ordinary one fails to understand Indian art’s real connotation because he reads always his own mentality into that of the ancient artists. Therefore, one finds in them only imaginative barbarians.7 It is interesting to have a scientific psychic study of the sculptor’s art generally described as erotic expressions. Erotic expression of whom or what? Was it the erotic feeling of the one who executed a piece of art in perfection and superb finish? The art definitely dazzles the brain of a connoisseur, makes him dumbfounded. Definitely it is no erotic feeling that surfaces in him, but the same as the artist had when he executed into the rough granite the many intricacies of his imaginations which belong more to the fairy land of dreams than to the real. Conception and execution require the highest intelligence and skill. In fact what is called for is a balanced cognitive and executive intelligence which requires the highest level of concentration. Balanced intelligence brings in concentration. According to Indian aesthetics which is purely spiritual both are the same. Hence the word Sama=dhi which means the dh/i or intelligence which is balanced or made sama.
(sama=dh/i+yate` iti sama=dh/i). The best art is the one intelligently and scientifically executed. It is the admirable admixture of scientific accuracy and artistic creation. It is the concentration of the artist that makes his artistic creation the perfect expression of beauty. Croce refers to “the artist, who never makes a stroke with his brush without having previously seen it with his imagination” and opines that artistic expression implies a vigilant will, which persists in not allowing certain, intuitions or representations to be lost. “Artistic intuition” says Croce, is “lyrical intuition”, and every art piece perfectly executed and springing from the intuitive feeling is the real art. According to him “… art is perfectly defined when simply defined as intuition”.8 It is interesting that King Agnimitra pointed out s`ith//ilasama=dh/i or impaired concentration as the reason for the portrait of Malavika lacking in fidelity to the original.
Chitragata=yamasya=m ka=ntivisamva=das`a=nki me` hrudayam
samprati s`idhilasama=dhim manye ye`ne`yamalikhita 9
In fact, it is sama=dh/i or balanced intellect and mind that an artist calls for and only in such a state one could perceive the transcendental ‘beauty’. The artist in the heights of his sama=dh/i, shedding his ego, finds himself in communion with the impersonal (apaurushe`ya). Having been in union with the inner and informing spirit (rather than the mere outward semblance) the artist naturally must have forgotten himself. The ‘personal’ finds itself identified with the ‘impersonal’. Lost in aesthetic contemplation, nothing personal was left even to scribble the by-line under his artistic creation. Lost in the aesthetic enjoyment or rasa the artist or the seeker of ‘beauty’ forgot himself, leave alone his claiming the authorship of the ‘beauty’ he brought out in colours or on a rough granite block. Hence the anonymity of the artists who did wonders in stones and graceful frescoes which lack in by-lines.10
If this is the mind-set of the artist, it requires an intelligent connoisseur or the a=sva=daka to understand and enjoy a real aristocratic art. The connoisseur must have equally high standard and mind-set as the artist does. The theory of rasa or aesthetics while dealing with process of enjoyment elaborates its three aspects, the rasikaor the enjoyer, rasavant or the object of enjoyment and rasa=sva=dana or the process of enjoyment. This is the triputi or three putas (petals) of art and in the ongoing process of enjoyment all these three petals wither away with the enjoyer and the object of enjoyment merging together into an unbound ecstasy. There is no more enjoyment and what remains is the ultimate rasa or bliss, the bliss born of the ultimate unity which in Indian literature is advaita. One may notice how this state of ta=da=tmya is compared by Sri Ramakrishna Paramahamsa with a salt doll diving down the sea to fathom its depth. The doll and the sea become one. Just like is the triput/i of art of which the whole aim is asva=dana or experience. The rasika (connoisseur) rasavant(object of enjoyment) and rasa=sva=dana (process of experience) combine to result in the withering away of the three petals of a=sva=dana and what remains would be the ultimate rasa or a=nanda. What is thus left is bliss born of the undifferentiated state or advaita which is the basis of or conditional to all enjoyments. Advaitaor oneness, the science of aesthetics says, is the basis of all kinds of enjoyment, and in the experience of Beauty this is more profound. Picture someone amidst a garden lost in himself enjoying the myriad colours and scent of flowers. Getting one with the entirety of Beauty, the rasika, having shed his personal identity, finds himself lost in the totality of rasa. The ‘personal’ becomes part of the ‘impersonal’. But the very moment the rasika or the enjoyer retracts from the impersonal to the personal, thinking that the beautiful garden belongs to somebody else, the process of enjoyment or rasa=sva=dana ceases. Feeling of difference or dvaita does away with the enjoyment or a=sva=dana which the connoisseur so far had in union with the entirety of Beauty. Hence the conclusion that advaita is the basis of a=sva=dana.
There is identity of subject and object, cause and effect in aesthetic contemplation. This experience is, says Viswanatha Kaviraja in his Sahithya Darpana, “pure, indivisible, self-manifested, compounded equally of joy and consciousness, free of admixture with any other perception, the very twin brother of mystic experience (brahma=sva=dana saho=dara), and the very life of it is super-sensuous (lo=ko=ttara) wonder”. This enjoyment is super-sensual and hyperphysical (alaukika) and the only proof of its reality is to be found in experience.11 The connoisseur is as significant as the artist because without him the art becomes meaningless and hence irrelevant. Only a real connoisseur can make out and interpret a real art and the value of an art piece depends on how the former reflects on it. Each and every motif, for instance, is noted for a particular dominant mood, i.e. one of the permanent rasas like raudra (ferocious), santa (quietude) or sringara (erotic). The artist of Khajurahu, for instance selected erotics as the dominant mood while writing his poetry in stone. The scene is with erotics as the main theme, but what the artist tried to express had never animated his mindset while executing his theme on stone. A disturbed mind, no doubt, cannot do it with such superb beauty and fine finish as seen at Khajurahu. It was again concentration or the balanced intelligence (sama=dh/i) of the artist that brought the artistic creation to the summit of perfection. An ordinary spectator may of course disparage it as a cluster of pornographic images. But that again depends on the mindset of the viewer. An ass looking into the mirror cannot expect an angel to look back. Eroticism or sringa=ra is one of the permanent moods of human being and as such has found a place of significance among the different rasas classified by many Indian aestheticians including Bharata. Indeed no other rasa than rati ensures the principle of regeneration that makes the evolution (utkra=nti) a reality. It would be a travesty of fact to judge that the Khajurahu art is erotic and was the expression eroticism. Artistic expression, whatever be the theme, is the product of concentration or Samadhi.
Religion and art thus become names for the same experience, intuition of reality and identity. This as Ananda Coomaraswamy, the famous philosopher and art critic, says, is “not, of course, exclusively a Hindu view” of art but has been “expounded by many others like Neo-Platonists, Hsieh Ho, Goethe, Blake, Schopenhauer and Schiller”. Aristotle had long ago realized the importance of Catharsis or the state of mental refinement (chittas`uddh/i in Sanskrit) as the source of all creative arts. Chittas`uddh/i, the purification of the heart, is the appointed road by which man arrives at the higher fulfilment.12 It can refine individual as well as collective minds. It can ennoble a national culture. Hence the national value of art, opines Sri Aurobindo.
The real art thus sources off only from the Himalayan heights of spiritual refinement and realization. The idea regarding art that it is the expression of the supreme realization has thus been universally accepted and the only difference is that India down the centuries took it to the pinnacle of philosophical perfection and explanation. India’s research and involvement in the fine arts always stood far in advance of other cultural zones.
Art is thus the highest realm where imagination and reality, becoming one, leads to creativity. An art piece is not a mere exactly reproduced replica of a model. It is original and creative. It is for our delight and this delight is something more than pleasure, it is the godlike ecstasy of liberation from the restless activity of mind and the senses, which are the veils of all reality, transparent only when we are at peace with ourselves. It was this cultural and national value of art many of the Indian artists imbibed and expressed in their creations. Artist or the painter was more than a yogi, for while the latter’s mission ends with his or her soul’s final union with the ultimate Beauty the artist even while in communion with Beauty brings it out in stone or on the canvas in multifarious forms for the connoisseurs to enjoy the ultimate rasa. Artist is the real bodhisattva who applies the chisel on stone or strokes with the brush to bring out the omnipresent Beauty for all to enjoy its ambrosia. Truly speaking, the seeker who sheds the ego alone could be a real artist who attains the state of s`ivam or bliss. Art is thus the faithful interpreter of philosophical idea.
Beauty is ‘Bliss’ (A+nanda) taking form, and is the way towards the ultimate joy. Beyond manifestation beauty loses itself in ‘joy’ or beauty and ‘bliss’ become indistinguishably one.13 It is the stage where the artist who seeks beauty becomes one with it. This beauty can never be measured “for it does not exist apart from the artist himself, and the rasika (devotee) who enters into his experience”.102 When the beauty recedes to the ‘joy’ and the forms are resolved the artist attains to the unity of the ‘person’ and is released from the meshes of ‘ego’.103 Thus the artist or the adorer breaks out from his ego when the ego either disappears in impersonality or fuses into a larger ‘I’ or the wider cosmic ‘I’ which comprehends all smaller selves.104 This is why the anonymity of the artist belongs to a type of culture dominated by the longing to be liberated from oneself. In the words of Coomaraswamy:
All the force – of this philosophy is directed against the delusion ‘I am the door’. ‘I’ am not in fact the door but the instrument; human individuality is not an end but only a means. The supreme achievement of individual consciousness is to lose or find (both words mean the same) itself in what is both its first beginning and its last end.14
According to Bhagavad Gita:
“That person who is giving up all sense objects goes about unattached, devoid of the idea of ownership and free from egoism – he attains peace”.15
Here the path of devotion reaches its goal where the artist and the object he seeks are unified and difference is abolished in the ecstasy of a divine oneness.16 Lifted into this highest state of the supra-mental light, everything of human life, pain, pleasure and indifference become converted into joy of the one self-existent delight. Interestingly enough Jon Keats had sung: “thing of beauty is a joy forever”. The joy is the outcome of the detachment from self and lives in freedom of spirit. Beauty is that profound expression of reality which satisfies our hearts with its own ultimate value. The artist is thus a high priest to search out this beauty, and poetry a priestess appointed in the god’s house to image the hard and secret realities deriving from a higher and transcendental vision.
The Spirit of the real, the great classical art and poetry is therefore to bring out what is universal and subordinate individual expression to the universal truth and beauty.17 All artistic and cultural works in order to be perfect must indeed have in the very act of creation the guidance of an inner power, corrected and purified by the divine light or the supra-rational beauty. According to Aurobindo there have been nations, civilizations and ages in which the expression of beauty reached its climax. The earliest creative works of India were philosophical and religious, Vedic and Upanishadic, and the miracle of these ancient writings is their perfect union of beauty, power and truth, the revealed utterance of that universal spirit. The expression of the spiritual through the aesthetic sense is the constant sense of Indian art.18 One could take for instance the great Buddha statues which are of the superb finish in conception and execution and with their greatness increased by the spiritualised aesthetic vision. The figure of the Buddha achieves the expression of the infinite in a finite image to embody the illimitable calm of Nirva=na in a human form on visage.19 The image of the Ka=lasamha=ra Siva is noted for its majesty, power, calmly forceful control, dignity and the idea of harmony behind the existence which the whole spirit and pose of the figure visibly incarnate. It is much more elegant by the concentrated divine passion of the spiritual overcoming of time and existence which the artist has successfully initiated and put into its every feature. Much more marvellous is the genius and skill in the treatment of the cosmic movement and delight in the dance of Siva, the success with which the posture of every limb is executed to bring out the rhythm, the rapturous intensity and abandon of the movement itself and yet the just restraint in the intensity of the motion, the subtle variation of each element of the single theme in the seizing idea of a master sculptor.20The expression of this divine beauty and grace is often the aim of Indian art whether it is in the ‘Descent of the Ganga’ at Mamallapuram, or the sculptures of the ‘Dasavatara’ at Deogarh, or the image of the multi-armed goddess, ‘Mahishammardini Durga’ or the Dryad of Sanchi. Japan and China, more especially perhaps the southern China, had in a different way perfected this fusion of spiritual and aesthetic mind and is a distinguishing feature of their art and culture.
The Persians had a sort of sensuous magic of the transforming aesthesis born of psychic delight and vision. “Ancient Greece did all its work of founding European civilization by a union of a subtle and active intelligence with a fine aesthetic spirit and worship of beauty. The Celtic nations again seem always to have had by nature a psychic delicacy and subtlety united with an instinctive turn for the imaginative beauty to which we surely owe much of the fine strain in English literature”.21 But there end these spontaneous miracles of fusion, Aurobindo laments. The modern mind, though inheritor of all these past experiences is a divided and complex mind that suffers under a mechanical and utilitarian civilization from which it cannot be free. Only the day we get back to the worship of delight and beauty will be our day of salvation. “For without these things there can be neither an assured nobility and sweetness in poetry and art nor a satisfied dignity and fullness of life nor a harmonious perfection of the spirit”.22
Like the supra-rational beauty there is the supra-rational good or the supra-rational ethics. As already noticed ethics or the good is the highest law that arranges and orders the activities of life and has the same value like the aesthetic elements. The highest ethics or the supra-rational ethics of life also leads man towards the highest or the ultimate reality. It is to be noticed that almost all original thinkers, eastern as well as western, have laid equal emphasis on the ethical aspect and have believed alike in the divine nature of the ethical ideal. Mathew Arnold pleads that men should follow not their ordinary but their best self.23 Like Arnold many English philosophers were deeply influenced by the idealism of the early German thought. Thomas Hill Green, for instance, wholeheartedly believed in the existence of Hegel’s ‘Divine spirit’ or ‘Reason’ which constantly pushes forward to its goal which was perfect realization. History, for Green as for Hegel, was a constant progress embodying the “eternal consciousness”. To him ideal is more real than the actual life. According to Green man is a spiritual being and as such not a member of the phenomenal series of the natural events. In man there is a principle which cannot be seen in other creations of nature and whose specific function is to render knowledge possible. “This spiritual principle underlying knowledge also has an ethical function, the consciousness of a moral ideal, and the determination of human “action thereby”. This ethical ideal is also the true good of a man’s life and an end in which the effort of a moral agent can find satisfaction. The main ethical insight, therefore, is that the purpose of all social reform is the perfection of man on spiritual side, the development of man of character and ideals. Green brings out the relation between civilization and ethics and determines that all the achievements of human activity, especially the political and social perfecting of the society, are nothing in themselves, and have a real meaning only so far as they render attainable by individuals a more thorough perfection of heart. A spiritualised conception of civilization, Green believes, is therefore most desirable in historical studies. The ultimate form of moral endeavour is spiritual act whereby the heart is lifted up to God or in which the entire self aspires to an ideal of personal holiness. The practical expression of this good or ethical ideal will have an additional value. It results in the amelioration of human society. But this is only secondary; the primary aim is the spiritual refinement of human soul. Indeed the finest expression of this ideal can be seen in the oriental philosophy where the Gita declares that “the end of all actions is the attainment of the divine knowledge”. (Sarvakarma+khilam pa+rtha jn#ane` parisama+pyathe).
1. K. M. Panikkar, Studies in Indian History, London, 1963, p. 150.
2. Ibid, p. 151.
3. Richard Burton, The Kamasutra of Vatsyayana, London, 1985, p. 55.
4. K. M. Panikkar’s ‘Introduction to Vatsyayana’, Richard Burton, op. cit, p. 61.
5. Burton, p. 74.
6. Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Poetry and Art, p. 201.
7. Sri Aurobindo, The Human Cycle – The Ideal of Human Unity – War and Self-Determination, p. 5.
8. Benedetto Croce, Essence of Aesthetics, London, 1921, pp. 30-33
9. Kasinatha Pandurang Parav (Ed), The Malavikagnimitra of Kalidasa, Bombay, 1924, Act II.
10. Ananda K Coomaraswamy, The Dance of Shiva, New Delhi, 1982, pp. 46-50.
11. Ibid, p. 58.
12. Sri. Aurobindo, The National Value of Art, Pondicherry, 1917, p. 12.
13. Ibid.
14. A. K. Coomaraswamy, The Dance of Siva, Delhi, 1982, p.66.
15. Maitri Upanishad, IV-5 quoted in A.K. Coomaraswamy, Christian and Oriental Philosophy of Art, Delhi, 1982, p. 52.
16. Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis of Yoga, Pondicherry, 1984, p. 343.
17. A. k. Coomaraswamy, Christian and Oriental Philosophy of Art, p. 41.
18. Gita 11, 71.
19. Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis of Yoga, p. 347.
20. Sri Aurobindo, The Human Cycle – The Ideal of Human Unity – War and Self-Determination, pp. 130-131.
21. Sri Aurobindo, The Future Poetry, Pondicherry, 1991.
22. Sri Aurobindo, The Foundations of Indian Culture, p. 232.
23. Ibid, p. 133.
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