Others have had a good chuckle at how well the name of a certain act, such as the tripod or the elephant, matched the aesthetic qualities of the pictorial evidence.
Many more just stared in disbelief and said "How did they do that?"
While the illustrations may be thought provoking, they are not part of the original manuscripts that Vatsyayana penned.
The illustrations were added at a later date by translators as a way of making the sometimes difficult wording of the Kama Sutra more readily understood by the average reader and were never intended to be part of the original manuscript, as common myth would imply.
Centuries after Vatsyayana first put the words to the Kama Sutra into the path of history, readers were still interested in his subject matter, perhaps even more so than his contemporaries.
Unfortunately for the average reader without a knowledge of the Hindu background from which Vatsyayana had written the masterpiece, some of the language and wording was exceedingly difficult to decipher even though Richard Burton had translated the text into the popular language of the Victorian era of which he lived.
People were really interested in the subject matter but, as with many difficult to understand subjects, people shied away from reading long, detailed passages that were hard to comprehend in favor of books which were easier to digest.
This trend continued on for quite some time before someone recognized a need for a change.
Proponents of the work and publishers could no longer stand to see the masterpiece shunned because it was too difficult to comprehend so an effort to make the text more readable began.
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