At Halle, he collaborated with Karl Friedrich Geldner (1852-1929) on important Vedic studies (Vedische Studien; three volumes).

In 1900 he was appointed rector of the University, and from 1886 to 1902, served as director and librarian of the Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft (German Oriental Society).

He died on 26 December 1908 in Madras shortly after setting foot in India, where he was scheduled to give a series of lectures.

One of Pischel's better written efforts was the masterful Grammatik der Prakrit-Sprachen (Grammar of the Prakrit languages, 1900).

Well-known students of Pischel were Friedrich Schrader (not to be mixed up with Friedrich Otto Schrader (1876-1961)), who became known as a writer, newspaper editor and art historian in Constantinople, Baron Alexander von Staël-Holstein, who became a famous scholar of Central Asian languages and Sinology, and Karl Eugen Neumann, himself a Buddhist since the 1880s, and with his translations of texts by Buddha one of the founders of occidental "Neo-Buddhism", with a huge impact on contemporary writers and intellectuals such as Hermann Hesse and Thomas Mann.