historical, philosophical, linguistic and cultural ranges of knowledge.
In the 4th edition of his book The Form-Critical Method, Klaus
Koch, Professor of Old Testament and Science of Religion at the Univer-
sity of Hamburg, gives a short historical survey of the difference between
synchronic and diachronic. He shows the insufficiency of classical gram-
mar and lexicography and their being outdated by the form-critical method
and linguistics. In the 19th century the common understanding was that a
language consisted of word forms and syntax and that people knowing the
grammar and dictionary knew the language. In the 20th century this view
has become outdated. Modern structural linguistics strives to outdate the
isolating derivatives and classification of single phenomenons. It seeks to
unite the highly contradictory fields of grammar and lexicography by
looking at an individual language as a multi-dimensional structural unit, as
an immense system of relations and meanings. Nowadays there is a common understanding that language first has to be examined in its
wholeness and in the cross-section of its contemporary structures. This is
called the synchronic investigation. If the synchronic examination is
followed by a study of the language from the historical point of view, it is
called the diachronic investigation.8 -
Peter Schreiner, now Professor of Indology at the University of
Zuerich, introduced methods which have been developed in Old Testa-
ment exegesis into the exegesis of old Indian texts, especially when he
investigated the Visnupurana in his habilitation thesis. When he deals with
the linguistic analysis of the Visnupurana he recognizes "that there are
hardly any preliminary studies for incorporating a linguistic analysis of the
puranic texts into a text analysis and for evaluating the results of observa-
tions concerning vocabulary, metrics, style or the usage of certain genres
and forms in order to come to a historical interpretation of texts, for
instance as sources of the history of texts or of religion.9
In the investigation of the Puranas the method of comparing texts
held good in separating earlier from later text material. For the understand-
ing of the text, the general, the stereotyped must be distinguished from the
special, the unique by comparison. All steps of text analysis are assump-
tions for a comparison of texts on the respective level. There is a hierarchy
of levels.Taking seriously this hierarchy means describing separately all
texts compared before making the comparisons.10"
According to Schreiner the specific problems of this level of
investigation in text analysis arises from the Hindu understanding of
tradition. The origin of Indian texts, Schreiner says, can be understood
synchronically. But so far western Indologists interpreted these texts
diachronically only. Therefore in interpreting the Puranas the main prob-
lems seems to be the integration of the synchronic and the diachronic pro-
cedure.
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