The Kamasutra: It's Not (Just) What You Think It Is

There

an aspect of religious sexuality in India. There are several. There's tantra, for instance, which uses sexual rituals to produce a burst of psychic energy that reaches to the gods. That certainly is a use of sexuality for a religious quest. Even in the Upanishads, there's a meditation on the sacrificial fire as a woman. You offer your seed into it as you would offer your seed into a woman. So there are moments in Indian history where sexuality has a real role in religion.

In the worship of the god Krishna, the erotic meditation on union with Krishna, the worshipper imagines himself (it's often a male worshipper) as a lover in the embrace of Krishna. So there's a whole context in Hinduism where sexuality is, in a way, very positively tied up with religion. You also have the erotic carvings in temples at Khajuraho and Konarak where eroticism lures you into the temple, and you find not sex, but God.

In the Hindu view of life, there are three essential components:

, which I've translated here as religion, social justice, moral law, that whole world. The second is

: power, politics, worldly success. And then the third is pleasure, which is

, of which sex is regarded as one of the most important parts, but not the only one.

So in the broadest sense, Hindu culture acknowledges erotic pleasure as an essential part of life. More strands of Hinduism celebrate sexuality than renounce it, and throughout Hinduism, eroticism is incorporated into worship of the gods. In that broad sense, Kama is part of it. But there's really nothing in the

itself about spiritual practice, no tantric rituals where you use sex to reach god. There's no spiritual goal in the

. It's a human goal, of which spirituality is one part, and the

is another part. They go together.

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