Gudrun Bühnemann


Gudrun Bühnemann is a professor in the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. She is an Indologist whose research interests include Sanskrit language and literature, Buddhism, Hinduism, Tantrism and yoga studies. Her work has especially attracted the interest of scholars working on South Asian iconography and ritual and of scholars of the emerging discipline of Yoga Studies for her discovery of early illustrated manuscripts showing sets of 84 asanas.

Life

Gudrun Bühnemann was born in Germany. She obtained her PhD in Classical Indian and Buddhist Studies at the University of Vienna. She spent extended periods of time as a post-doctoral researcher at Pune University in India and at Nagoya University and Kyoto University in Japan. Her research has been supported by fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science and the German Research Council, among other organizations. She has published numerous books on South Asian iconography and ritual. These often use material from previously unpublished manuscripts and from illustrated manuscripts.

Reception

Sanjukta Gupta, reviewing her edited collection Mandalas and Yantras in the Hindu Tradition, calls the book "a wonderfully designed volume of essays" and praises Bühnemann with the words "The editor, Professor Gudrun Bühnemann, has already published excellent works on Hindu gods, rituals and iconography. This is no exception."
Richard Rosen calls Bühnemann's Eighty-Four Asanas in Yoga "comprehensive", and notes that the number 84 signifies completeness and sometimes sacredness. Mark Singleton notes of the same work that Bühnemann demonstrated that asanas had been illustrated from very early in the modern period, for instance in the Joga Pradīpikā, and that her study showed that standing poses were largely missing from hatha yoga.
I. M. P. Raeside, reviewing her Puja: A Study in Smārta Ritual, calls it a very full study of the theory and practice of Puja in Hinduism, noting its value in describing three specific traditional pujas, countering in Raeslde's view "trendy pujas, which have only tenuous connexions with earlier Hindu rites". He notes that Bühnemann "has benefited throughout from a lengthy residence in Poona from 1982 to 1985" where she attended and discussed "many of these ceremonies".

Works/Books