Kamasutram, generally known to the Western world as Kama Sutra, is an ancient Indian text on human sexual behavior, widely considered to be the
standard work on love in Sanskrit literature. The text was composed by Vatsyayana, as a brief summary of various earlier works belonging to a tradition known generically as Kama Shastra, the
science of love. Kama is
literally desire. Sutra signifies a thread, or discourse threaded on a series of aphorisms. Sutra was a
standard term for a technical text, thus also the Yogasutram of Patanjali. The text is originally known as Vatsyayana Kamasutram ("Vatsyayana's Aphorisms on Love"). Tradition holds that the author was a celibate scholar. He is believed to have lived sometime between the 1st to 6th centuries AD, probably during the great cultural flowering of the Gupta period.