Oriental Research between Philology, Botany and Poetics?

In: Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft, 152 (2002), Nr. 2. pp. 295-308. ISSN 0341-0137

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Abstract

Probably everyone who has attempted to translate a classical Sanskrit text with some amount of real-life information on plants will retain some sort of bad (scientific) conscience. Often one resorts to dictionaries for identification, in the best case supplemented by scattered studies that centre either on single texts or on authors, well aware of the fact that these dictionaries do not represent the current state of research. And although we know that modern Western and ancient Eastern terminology often only seem to match as long as we have the dictionary before us, but differ confusingly when we examine indigenous definitions, we could easily tend to think that in the case of plants the matter might be easier than in the case of, for instance, philosophy.