Vatsyayana c. 350 – c. 425

Vatsyayana, also called Pakshilasvamin, was a fourth- or fifth-century Indian Nyaya philosopher, the author of the Nyaya-bhasya, the foundational commentary on the Nyaya Sutras of Akshapada Gautama. His commentary established the standard interpretation of Nyaya as a school of valid epistemic instruments and inferential reasoning, dealing systematically with perception, inference, comparison, and verbal testimony as the four sources of knowledge. His sustained attention to the conditions of valid argument and to the criticism of Buddhist epistemology shaped the long tradition of Indian logical and epistemological analysis until the rise of Navya-Nyaya nearly a millennium later.

Mallanaga Vatsyayana flourished in northern India around the fourth or fifth century AD, probably during the late Gupta period and probably at Pataliputra (Patna), where the urban world he describes was at its height. Almost nothing is known of his life; the brief autobiographical colophon to his work names him as Vatsyayana and as the author of the treatise composed 'in the city, after long study and after the example of the great teachers'. He is to be distinguished from the later Naiyayika commentator Pakṣilasvāmin Vatsyayana, with whom he is sometimes confused.

His one surviving work is the Kāmasūtra, the foundational Sanskrit treatise on kāma, the third of the four canonical human aims. Composed of some twelve hundred and fifty short sutras in seven books, it explicitly synthesises and supersedes a long preceding literature, of which the treatises of Babhravya, Charayana, and Suvarnanabha are named but no longer survive. The standard medieval Sanskrit commentary is the Jayamangala of Yashodhara, around the twelfth century.

The Kāmasūtra sets the cultivated practice of pleasure within the wider economy of dharma and artha and treats the education of the urbane householder, the ethics of courtesans, the sociology of mistresses, the analysis of love and jealousy, and the aesthetics of the cultivated life as a single subject; far from the sexual handbook of its modern reception, the work is a major document of Indian moral psychology, classical Indian aesthetics, and the social history of urban late antiquity.