The paradox of sexual pleasure is that all those conditions which create sexual pleasure and happiness lie outside sexuality. The paradox of intimacy is that distance is the first condition of intimacy: the intimacy in which there is no distance turns very soon either to resentment or even to hatred. The paradox of pleasure is that unrestrained pleasure kills itself: in other words, self-restraint is the very first condition of pleasure. The paradox of having is that the more one has, the greater is one’s discontent. Thirdly, the method is to show that life is to be understood, and lived, paradoxically for human life is paradoxical. This method is a striving towards understanding the self as the world, and the world as the self. The human body is as sacred as the spirit. The physical and the material, as forms of energy, are also the spiritual, and equally worthy of reverence. The human species is not separate from nature the five elements and the material and the spiritual are not two separate domains either. In their integral togetherness, they constitute the life force. The physical body is not separated from the mind nor are they separated from emotions and feelings. Secondly, the method shows the natural inner unity of all human attributes. The problem is one tends to fragment one experience from another, and then seek to understand it which, of course, is impossible, for the attributes of a human person are interrelated in a way that one flows into the other, and can be understood only in their togetherness. Understanding is, therefore, experiential: not merely intellectual. Firstly, every person wants to understand his or her experience, and not just go through it without making sense of what one is experiencing. Of the many attributes of that method of understanding life, we need concentrate here mainly on four. It is not until that method is understood that the various Indian views of human life and relationships could ever be understood, the relations between man and woman above all. But there was in all this a certain method of understanding. And it is there most of all, long before the Kamasutra, that human sexual impulse is investigated systematically. Forty long chapters are devoted to it in the great epic of Mahabharata. The quest of pleasure and happiness, which included sexual pleasure, was a subject of inquiry in the Upanishads, the ancient texts on Indian philosophy. THE KAMASUTRA IS the product of a civilization which had set out to understand human life in all its expressions. Here, the Indian philosopher Chaturvedi Badrinath captures the essence of the Indian view of sexuality where there is no division or dualism between the physical and the spiritual. The intimate ecstasy of physical love is a way to experience the deepest and ultimate joy of being in love with God. The Kamasutra should be read in the Tantric tradition of India where union between man and woman is a door to cosmic and divine union. The book has stood the test of time, and it is still considered to be the most comprehensive and thorough study of erotic love anywhere in the world. He conducted extensive research to find out sexual types, behaviours and attitudes to determine the levels of sexual fulfilment among men and women.
IT IS BELIEVED that the Kamasutra, the Indian handbook on sacred sex, was written by a celibate monk, Vatsyayana.