The Panchasakya is considerably longer, and is divided into five Arrows. The author was Jyotirisha.
Woman, in these treatises and poetic elaborations and expositions, is the central theme, and her physical traits, ideally considered, and the elements that, cumulatively, constitute her dominant attraction, are minutely and imaginatively depicted: the texture of the skin, the shape of the moon face, the coloring of the hair, the brightness of eye are measured and defined in relation to cosmic phenomena, to flowers, to the lotus, to the mustard blossom, to the lily and the fawn, and, above all, her devoutness is stressed, and her impassioned worship of the Hindu pantheon, the totality of the deities.
The Kama Sutra is an extended exposition of love and its procedures and manipulations, in some 1200 verses divided into sections in which various aspects and techniques in amatory mores are treated.
And, like The Perfumed Garden and similar Oriental excursions into sexual activities, it diffuses an aura of religiosity, a solemn sense of reverence, a divine acknowledgment. The tone is frank without prurience: the elaborate classifications and injunctions are minute and lucid without introducing an undercurrent, however unobtrusive, of deliberate and gross scurrilities. It is not libidinous, then, in intent, for the author himself, a profoundly contemplative religious devotee, adumbrated his work, not as a salacious and lewd inducement to debauchery, but as an exposition of the physiological man who, while making concessions in conformity with certain established amatory principles, may yet transcend his carnal desires and, instead of being enslaved by his erotic lusts, may become master of them and use them under due control, but never without restraint and a kind of Hellenic and Aristotelian moderation, a physiological aurea mediocritas.
The floruit of the author of the Kama Sutra has not been determined definitively. It has been variously assigned between the first and the sixth century A.D.
The entire work is pervaded by the three Hindu concepts of Dharma, goodness or virtue, in the Greek sense, Artha, which is wealth, and Kama, sensual pleasure.
The range of topics covers normal and abnormal conditions and practices: wedded love and fellatio, public harlotry and transvestism, courtship and the frenzies of passion, the behavior of wives during a husband’s absence, the artifices of feminine conquest, osculation and amatory permutations, the employment of an intermediary, the ways of the courtesan, and, finally, personal adornment, tonic medicines, methods of exciting desire.
In respect of the latter, there are various recipes involving oils, unguents, and juices. One unguent that has amatory appeal is composed of tabernamontana coronaria, costus speciosus, and flacourtia cataphracta.
Another aid is oil of hogweed, echites putrescens, the sarina plant, yellow amaranth, and leaf of nymphae. This salve is applied to the body.
Let the man eat the powder of the nelumbrium speciosum, the blue lotus, the mesna roxburghii, together with clarified butter, which is ghee, and honey.