Kama

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Kama is the Sanskrit word for desire, and for the pleasure desire reaches toward — sensual, aesthetic, erotic, the whole register of wanting and enjoying. In the classical Hindu scheme of the aims of human life, the puruṣārthas, it stands as one of four: alongside dharma (duty, the moral and religious order), artha (wealth and worldly success), and mokṣa (release from the cycle of rebirth). Pleasure, on this reckoning, is not a concession or a failing. It is a proper end, to be pursued in its place and by its own art.

That placement matters, because the same texts that legitimate kama also rank it. Dharma governs the other aims; pleasure pursued at the cost of duty or truth is pleasure gone wrong. The tradition that gave kama a literature — the Kāmasūtra of Vātsyāyana, compiled in the early centuries of the Common Era — treats erotic life as a discipline with its own learning, not a surrender to appetite. Renunciant currents took a harder line. The Bhagavad-Gītā names desire, kāma, as the standing enemy of the self, the appetite that clouds judgment and binds the soul to action and its fruits; the goal there is to act without craving the reward. Both readings sit inside the same scripture-world. Whether kama is an aim to cultivate or a fetter to loosen depends on which life the text has in view — the householder’s or the renouncer’s.

Desire was also a god. Kāma, or Kāmadeva, is the deity of love, pictured young and beautiful, riding a parrot, bow of sugarcane in hand, his arrows tipped with flowers and his bowstring a line of bees. A much-repeated myth has Shiva, deep in ascetic trance, burn Kāma to ash with a glance from his third eye when the god looses an arrow to rouse him toward the goddess — desire incinerated by the very renunciation it tried to interrupt, then, in some tellings, restored. The story holds the whole ambivalence in one image.

The word reaches back before any of this. In the Rig Veda’s hymn of creation, kāma is named as the first stirring that arose in the One at the beginning — desire as the seed of mind, the impulse by which the unmanifest moves toward becoming. The cosmological sense and the human one are not the same, and the tradition rarely collapses them; but the line of thought is suggestive, that the force which makes a world and the force which moves a person toward another were caught by a single word.

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→ Related: Indra · Soma · Kali · Lakshmi · Agape