Part 24 (2/2)

Of the essential portions of the book it is sufficient to say that they are similar to those of the other avowedly erotic Eastern works, the contents of the principal of which have been touched upon by Burton in the Terhts and in some of his notes

Finally we are told that the Kama Sutra was composed for the benefit of the world by Vatsyayana, while leading the life of a religious student, and wholly engaged in the conte of this holy man amounts to very much the same as that of Maupassant, which is, to use Tolstoy's words, ”that life consists in pleasures of which woain reflected delight of depicting this love and exciting it in others” [400]

The work lets a flood of light on Hindu manners and customs; and it must be borne in h price and intended only for ”curious students” In the Preface, Burton and Arbuthnot observe that after a perusal of the Hindoo work the reader will understand the subject upon which it treats, ”At all events from a materialistic, realistic and practical point of view If all science is founded more or less on a stratuenerally certain matters intimately connected with their private, donorance of them has unfortunately wrecked e of a subject generally ignored by the masses would have enabled nus which they believed to be quite incoht worthy of their consideration”

Writing to Payne, 15th January, 1883, Burton says, ”Has Arbuthnot sent you his Vatsyayana? [401] He and I and the Printer have started a Hindu Kama Shastra (Ars Amoris Society) It will e him” Later Arbuthnot, in reply to a question put to him by a friend, said that the Society consisted practically of hihton [402]

Chapter XXVI The Ananga Ranga or Lila Shastra

Bibliography:

70 The Book of the Sword 1884

116 The Ananga Ranga [403]

The title page of the second book, the Ananga Ranga, which was issued in 1885, was as follows:

ANANGA RANGA (Stage of the Bodiless One) or THE HINDU ART OF LOVE (Ars Amoris Indica) Translated from the Sanskrit and annotated by A F F and B F R

Cosmopoli MDCCCLxxxV, for the Kama Shastra Society of London and Benares, and for private circulation only

Dedicated to that shtened interest in studying the manners and customs of the olden East

We are told that this book ritten about 1450 by the arch-poet Kalyana Mull, [404] that lithographed copies have been printed by hundreds of thousands, that the book is in the hands of alhout the nearer East,” and also that it is ”an ethnological treasure, which tells us as ht of Arab manners and customs in the cinquecento”

In India the book is known as the Kama Shastra or Lila Shastra, the Scripture of Play or Amorous Sport The author says quaintly, ”It is true that no joy in the world of e of the Creator Second, however, and subordinate only to his are the satisfaction and pleasure arising from the possession of a beautiful woman”

”From the days of Sotades and Ovid,” says the writer of the Preface, who is certainly Burton, ”to our own time, Western authors have treated the subject either jocularly or with a tendency to hyospel of debauchery The Indian author has taken the opposite view, and it is impossible not to adly difficult theaamy, he would save the married couple fro their pleasures in every conceivable way and by supplying the psychically pure and physically pleasant to each other”

There is a reference to this work in Burton's Vikraards the neutral state, that poet was not happy in his ideas who sang,

'Whene'er indifference appears, or scorn, Then, man, despair! then, hapless lover, mourn!'

for a man versed in the Lila Shastra can soon turn a woman's indifference into hate, which I have shown is as easily permuted to love”

This curious book concludes: ”May this treatise, Ananga Ranga, be beloved of eth fro as Lakshed in the study of the Vedas, and as long as the earth, the moon and the sun endure”

The Kama Shastra Society also issued a translation of the first twenty chapters of The Scented Garden [406] In reality it was a translation of the French version of Liseux, but it was imperfect and had only a few notes It has been repeatedly denied that Burton had anything to do with it All we can say is that in a letter to Mr A G Ellis of 8th May 1887, he distinctly calls it ”my old version,” [407] and he must mean that well-known edition of 1886, because all the other ie