WHAT ARE THE 64 ARTS MENTIONED IN HINDU SCRIPTURES

64 arts to be studied: Vatsyayana

(Translation from Sanskrit by Richard
Burton (1883)

The following are the arts to be studied, together with the Kama Sutra:
· Singing
· Playing on musical instruments
· Dancing
· Union of dancing, singing, and playing instrumental music
· Writing and drawing
· Tattooing
· Arraying and adorning an idol with rice and flowers
· Spreading and arranging beds or couches of flowers, or flowers
upon the ground
· Colouring the teeth, garments, hair, nails and bodies, i.e.
staining, dyeing, colouring and painting the same
· Fixing stained glass into a floor
· The art of making beds, and spreading out carpets and cushions
for reclining
· Playing on musical glasses filled with water
· Storing and accumulating water in aqueducts, cisterns and
reservoirs
· Picture making, trimming and decorating
· Stringing of rosaries, necklaces, garlands and wreaths
· Binding of turbans and chaplets, and making crests and topknots
of flowers
· Scenic representations, stage playing Art of making ear
ornaments Art of preparing perfumes and odours
· Proper disposition of jewels and decorations, and adornment in
dress
· Magic or sorcery
· Quickness of hand or manual skill
· Culinary art, i.e. cooking and cookery
· Making lemonades, sherbets, acidulated drinks, and spirituous
extracts with proper flavour and colour
· Tailor's work and sewing
· Making parrots, flowers, tufts, tassels, bunches, bosses, knobs,
etc., out of yarn or thread
· Solution of riddles, enigmas, covert speeches, verbal puzzles and
enigmatical questions
· A game, which consisted in repeating verses, and as one person
finished, another person had to commence at once, repeating
another verse, beginning with the same letter with which the last
speaker's verse ended, whoever failed to repeat was considered
to have lost, and to be subject to pay a forfeit or stake of some
kind
· The art of mimicry or imitation
· Reading, including chanting and intoning
· Study of sentences difficult to pronounce. It is played as a game
chiefly by women, and children and consists of a difficult
sentence being given, and when repeated quickly, the words are
often transposed or badly pronounced
· Practice with sword, single stick, quarter staff and bow and arrow
· Drawing inferences, reasoning or inferring
· Carpentry, or the work of a carpenter
· Architecture, or the art of building
· Knowledge about gold and silver coins, and jewels and gems
· Chemistry and mineralogy
· Colouring jewels, gems and beads
· Knowledge of mines and quarries
· Gardening; knowledge of treating the diseases of trees and
plants, of nourishing them, and determining their ages
· Art of cock fighting, quail fighting and ram fighting
· Art of teaching parrots and starlings to speak
· Art of applying perfumed ointments to the body, and of dressing
the hair with unguents and perfumes and braiding it
· The art of understanding writing in cypher, and the
writing of words in a peculiar way
· The art of speaking by changing the forms of words. It is
of various kinds. Some speak by changing the beginning
and end of words, others by adding unnecessary letters
between every syllable of a word, and so on
· Knowledge of language and of the vernacular dialects
· Art of making flower carriages
· Art of framing mystical diagrams, of addressing spells and
charms, and binding armlets
· Mental exercises, such as completing stanzas or verses on
receiving a part of them; or supplying one, two or three lines
when the remaining lines are given indiscriminately from
different verses, so as to make the whole an entire verse with
regard to its meaning; or arranging the words of a verse written
irregularly by separating the vowels from the consonants, or
leaving them out altogether; or putting into verse or prose
sentences represented by signs or symbols. There are many
other such exercises.
· Composing poems
· Knowledge of dictionaries and vocabularies
· Knowledge of ways of changing and disguising the appearance of
persons
· Knowledge of the art of changing the appearance of things, such
as making cotton to appear as silk, coarse and common things to
appear as fine and good
· Various ways of gambling
· Art of obtaining possession of the property of others by means of
muntras or incantations
· Skill in youthful sports
· Knowledge of the rules of society, and of how to pay respect and
compliments to others
· Knowledge of the art of war, of arms, of armies, etc.
· Knowledge of gymnastics
· Art of knowing the character of a man from his features
· Knowledge of scanning or constructing verses
· Arithmetical recreations
· Making artificial flowers
· Making figures and images in clay


Translations of 3 arts (marked in bold above) by Richard Burton may
have to be revised in the context of Alain Danielou’s translation (1994)
based on Jayamangala commentary, written in Sanskrit by Yashodhara
during the Middle Ages, and a modern Hindi commentary by Devadatta
Shastri. The Sanskrit terms in the original are:
· Akshara mushtika kathanam
· Mlecchita vikalpaj
· Des’a bhaashaa vijjnaanam
These terms mean (related to language or bhaashaa communication):
· conveying messages (stories) through fingers and wrists (dance
mudras)
· cryptography (alternative representation of language through
picture writing)
· knowledge of dialects

http://titus.uni-frankfurt.de/texte/etcs/ind/aind/klskt/kamasutr/kamas.htm
Notes: (Page numbers at the end of lines according to the Nirṇayasāgarayantrālaya text.)
(Chapter and verse numbers at the head of lines according to the Chaukhambha Sanskrit
Sansthan text.) Variants from the Chaukhambha edition are marked as [Ch.]