Jayarava's Raves · started 2005; twenty-one years as of this page's review date; the blog's own archive widget counts 657 posts · the output curve is steep: near-weekly from 2008 to 2011 (52, 53, 52 posts a year), 53 again in 2014, then a long decline — 36 in 2016, 19 in 2019, 12 a year in 2021–2023, 19 in 2025 · still active; the most recent post at review time is 4 September 2026 · entirely free, hosted on Blogspot, no paywall — but comments are switched off, his stated reason being that "almost no one actually reads the essays carefully enough" · the clear inflection is around 2012, when his research turned to the Heart Sutra and the essays went from a self-imposed 1,000-word cap to a standing 5,000 words with footnotes and bibliography · this page is based on 18 posts read in full, spanning 17 September 2007 to October 2024: four from the earliest period (2005–2009, the first 20% of the site's span), with coverage on both sides of the 2012 turn · the site has no "best of" or "start here" page, but he maintains six topic indexes of his own (Prajnaparamita, Karma & Rebirth, Philosophy, Science, History, Secular Emptiness) and this page follows those as its primary selector — the author's own statement of what he has written on a subject beats what travelled furthest — with outside discussion as a secondary signal
For 67 years, nobody could parse the first sentence of the Heart Sutra.
Not "found it mysterious" — could not parse it. In 1948 the German scholar Edward Conze produced the critical edition of the Sanskrit Heart Sutra that the world has treated as the original ever since. He read the verb vyavalokayati sma ("examines") as intransitive, taking no object, and read pañcaskandhāṃs ("the five aggregates," accusative plural, the thing being examined) as a nominative plural subject. The sentence fell apart. He papered over the cracks with punctuation.
Over the following 67 years, at least a dozen leading Buddhist studies scholars commented on that Sanskrit text and published translations of it. Several were Sanskrit specialists. Every one of them walked past the sentence.
In 2012 an amateur noticed: a chemistry graduate working as a librarian in Cambridge, who had taught himself Pali. His name is Jayarava Attwood. He spent three years on it and published the correction in 2015.
Note that my 2015 article has yet to be cited by anyone, which presumably means that most people interested in the Sanskrit Heart Sutra have yet to get the news.The Heart Sutra and the Crisis in Buddhist Philology, 2017-06
What is inside that sentence is the engine of twenty-one years and 657 essays: a field can be collectively wrong about something plainly visible for seventy years, and go on being wrong after it is pointed out.
His root question is not "what does Buddhism say." It is one layer nastier: how much of Buddhism's core doctrine is a claim about how experience works, mistaken for a claim about what exists?
That line yielded three answers.
One: the Heart Sutra is not an Indian scripture. It is a digest assembled in seventh-century China out of a Chinese translation. Jan Nattier argued this in 1992. In 2007 Jayarava was merely an enthusiastic reader, blogging a recommendation of her article and ending with the sigh that "we Buddhists cannot afford to be fundamentalists when it comes to texts." Twenty years later he was the man who nailed the argument down: a dozen-plus peer-reviewed papers, character-by-character comparison, and a string of tells that only a back-translation from Chinese can explain. The most striking: the Sanskrit Heart Sutra says avidyā-kṣaya ("the destruction of ignorance"), while every Indian Buddhist text — Pali, Sanskrit, Gandhari, across all sects — says avidyā-nirodha ("the cessation of ignorance"). The sole exception is this one text.
In 2024 he did something scholars rarely do: he pulled his own claims back in. He listed exactly three things as established, and moved one of his own earlier datings into the "unsettled" column. He also wrote down what would refute him:
To be clear, I think these facts are falsifiable. One simply has to find, for example, a manuscript or scrap of manuscript of the Sanskrit Heart Sutra from before the seventh century...What Have We Proven About the Heart Sutra?, 2024-09
Two: karma is the Buddhist version of the just-world myth, and it fails on Buddhism's own logic. This conclusion took him eleven years. In 2008 he was still defending karma — as a useful assumption:
It is better, ie more helpful, to believe that you cannot escape the consequences of your actions because that will make you more sensitive to how you act in the present.Karma and Rebirth, 2008-04-25
Same blog, 2019:
Karma is the Buddhist myth of a just world.Against Karma, 2019-01
The turn came from a technical contradiction he found himself, and named: action at a temporal distance. Buddhism says everything arises and ceases in the moment. Karma says the suffering you feel now was caused by a condition that ceased long ago. Want both, and the ceased cause has to somehow still be there. Rival schools built two entirely different metaphysics to manage this. Neither worked.
Either we can have experience arising and passing away in the moment, or we can have actions connected to consequences, but not both.Further Problems in Karma Theory, 2015-03
He is not dismantling Buddhism. He is taking over its moral job. Without karma, nobody is keeping your books:
I do not believe in karma because I do not believe that suffering restores justice; all suffering is unjust and there is no just world to balance it out.Against Karma: Modern Buddhism, 2019-01
Three, and this is the most original: "emptiness" was never a claim about the world. It is the name of a meditative state. He starts in linguistics: "empty" belongs to the container metaphor, and a container holding anything at all is not empty — so the question "empty of what?" is not a legitimate question. That question happens to be Buddhism's favourite.
Then he supplies a positive answer. The earliest technical use of śūnyatā refers to the meditative state in which attention has been withdrawn from the senses and sensory experience has stopped entirely. Not ontology — an operating instruction. And the slogan "form is emptiness" was, in the earlier texts, a different sentence:
I might never have thought of this had I not discovered that the phrase was not originally rūpaṃ śūnyatā "form is emptiness", but rūpaṃ māyā "appearance is illusion".On the Cognitive Linguistics of Emptiness, 2022-11
Everyone understands "appearance is illusion," and nobody would argue with it. In transmission it became an ungrammatical slogan, and two thousand years of readers took the bad grammar for depth. He has a one-line account of that mechanism, and its reach goes far beyond Buddhism: failing to understand something bound up with authority is treated as evidence that it is profound — rather than evidence that it is hard, complicated, or wrong.
The biggest thing to take from him may not be the three conclusions but the posture. He is not a Buddhist studies scholar; no doctorate; he audited the Sanskrit classes. He has exactly one asset: he goes back to the source text for anything anyone hands him second-hand. One unremarkable word at a time, until the details add up to a case.
His most honest stroke he saved for himself. The philologist's signature move is the etymology. In 2023 he wrote an entire essay arguing that etymology is nearly useless for explaining what a word means — a last resort, not a first one — and admitted he had done it himself, to sound erudite.
His position now: no afterlife, no karma, a universe that is ordered but not morally ordered. And this, he says, makes human life "more precious and more meaningful, not less."
For sixty-seven years, nobody could parse the first sentence of the Heart Sutra.
Not "found its meaning profound" — could not parse it grammatically. In 1948 Edward Conze produced the critical edition of the Sanskrit text that the world has since treated as the original. The trouble is in the opening line, the one usually rendered "Avalokiteshvara, practising the deep perfection of wisdom, saw that the five aggregates are empty." Conze read the verb vyavalokayati sma ("examines, observes") as intransitive — that is, as an action with no object — and read pañcaskandhāṃs ("the five aggregates," accusative plural) as a nominative plural, making it the agent. The sentence came apart. He smoothed the lumps over with punctuation.
The edition was revised and reissued in 1967 and 1973 with the error intact.
Over the sixty-seven years that followed, by his own count, at least a dozen front-rank Buddhist studies scholars commented on this Sanskrit text and offered their own translations. Several were Sanskrit specialists — including Jan Nattier, whom he calls his scholar-hero. A bestselling author built a reputation as an authority on the strength of translating it.
But none of them questioned why the first sentence could not be parsed.The Heart Sutra and the Crisis in Buddhist Philology, 2017-06
In 2012 an amateur noticed: a chemistry graduate working as a librarian in Cambridge, self-taught in Pali, who had audited Sanskrit classes. He spent three years on it and published the correction in 2015. Avalokiteshvara is the agent of all three verbs in the sentence, and what he is examining is the five aggregates. Corrected, the Sanskrit lines up with all the Chinese versions, and every mark of punctuation can be removed, because the phrase boundaries were clear all along.
Then this:
Note that my 2015 article has yet to be cited by anyone, which presumably means that most people interested in the Sanskrit Heart Sutra have yet to get the news.ibid.
Jayarava Attwood, a New Zealander who moved to Cambridge, England, in 2002. The name was given to him on ordination into the Triratna Buddhist Order in 2005; in Sanskrit it means "the cry, shout or roar of victory." He also gave himself a Chinese name, Atewude Shenghan — a detail that roughly sums the man up: someone pedantic enough about language to maintain an identity in three of them.
He is not an academic. A BSc in chemistry, a postgraduate diploma in librarianship. Pali self-taught, Sanskrit audited at Cambridge, and Buddhist Middle Chinese — in his own words — he "muddles through." On that footing he has published some two dozen peer-reviewed articles across nine journals, more than a dozen of them on the Heart Sutra.
The blog's origins are domestic: it began as a run of long emails to a friend, Ann/Pema in Cleveland, Ohio, who was a new Buddhist and to whom he was explaining his thoughts on Buddhist themes. Having started, he found he had a lot to say. Early posts were capped at a thousand words; the cap went, and the essays became a standing 5,000 words with footnotes and references, on the grounds that "these days I'm wrestling with major intellectual issues and I don't think anyone is served by yet more superficial analysis."
He was still posting in September 2026. Comments were switched off years ago, and the reason sits on his About page in one unapologetic line: almost no one actually reads the essays carefully enough.
It is easy to file him as a man debunking Buddhism with textual criticism. That misreads him. The problem he has not put down in twenty-one years sits a layer below debunking, and he walked into it through a very concrete difficulty of translation: the Pali and Sanskrit root bhū-, used for "be, exist," has a semantic field of "become, arise, come into being, happen, abide." It is not a state. It is a process. Western being is a state; ancient Indian being is a process.
In March 2009, reading Bryan Magee's Confessions of a Philosopher, he came across Magee's definition of the discipline: the ur-question of philosophy has been "what, ultimately, is there?" — an ontological question. Then he ran a comparison.
In the Pali texts, nearly all the analysis, all the practices, all the definitions of suffering fall on the subjective pole of experience. The object pole has almost no content beyond having to be there. What the texts care about is how sensory contact gives rise to vedanā (the hedonic quality of experience), and how the cascade of mental functions after it becomes suffering.
I would suggest then that Buddhism is not, or at least not in its earliest known texts, a philosophy, and the Buddha was not a philosopher... the object is immaterial compared to our experience of it, and how we understand that experience.Buddhism and Western Philosophy: the Fundamental Mismatch, 2009-03-20
That is the bedrock of everything he does: early Buddhism is an inquiry into how experience works — epistemology, in modern terms — and not an inquiry into what the world is made of.
And once that bedrock is laid, something uncomfortable follows. The most famous, most revered doctrines in Buddhist history — rebirth, karma, emptiness, the non-existence of phenomena — are all ontological claims. They all answer "what is there."
So his root question is: how many of Buddhism's proudest propositions are a misreading of "how experience works" as "what reality is"? And once that misreading happens, how much metaphysics gets built afterwards to keep the inconsistencies from showing?
He later added a second storey. He realised he was not only arguing with Buddhists but with the scholars who study them — because their methods were borrowed from elsewhere, and nobody had checked the receipt.
Buddhist philologists inherited our methods and attitudes from European Biblical scholars. As they were dealing the word of God, the early philologists had a real problem with the variability of their manuscripts.The Heart Sutra and the Crisis in Buddhist Philology, 2017-06
The assumption of a perfect original; the word "corruption" for variation; the term "contamination" for manuscripts influencing one another — behind that whole vocabulary sits a theological premise: the source was pure, and time can only dirty it. Applying it, he notes, to the texts of a religion whose central claim is that everything changes is especially absurd.
Get the timeline right first, because this is the best part of the story: in 2007 Jayarava was just a reader.
That September he blogged a recommendation of a fifteen-year-old paper — Jan Nattier's 1992 "The Heart Sutra: A Chinese Apocryphal Text?" Nattier had noticed a run of anomalies: the text does not open with "thus have I heard"; there is no audience reaction at the end; the Buddha never appears; the characters you would expect in a Perfection of Wisdom sutra (Subhuti, for instance) are absent, while Avalokiteshvara turns up out of nowhere; and there is a mantra in the body of it, which almost no early text of this class has.
Her explanation handled every anomaly at once: the text was put together in China. The core passage was copied from Kumarajiva's Chinese translation of the Large Sutra, a frame written in Perfection-of-Wisdom idiom was added around it, along with a dharani from elsewhere. Then the whole thing was back-translated into Sanskrit.
The decisive evidence is direction. The same passage in the Sanskrit Heart Sutra and the Sanskrit Large Sutra means the same thing but shares almost no vocabulary; the same passage in the Chinese Heart Sutra and the Chinese Large Sutra is nearly identical character for character. Nattier's conclusion:
there is no straight forward way to derive the Sanskrit Heart Sutra from the Sanskrit Large Sutra, or vice versa.Nattier 1992, quoted in The Heart Sūtra - Indian or Chinese?, 2007-09-17
That 2007 post ended on a rather optimistic note:
One thing is clear from this, and her other publications, we Buddhists cannot afford to be fundamentalists when it comes to texts!The Heart Sūtra - Indian or Chinese?, 2007-09-17
Then two things happened that he had not expected.
First, Nattier's paper produced no follow-up. By 2017, when he wrote his 500th post, it was twenty-five years old: no flurry of papers, no minds changed, and in his view "probably the best Buddhist Studies article ever written" was still being treated as provisional. Even Jonathan Silk, who was himself agitating for a crisis in philology, was still referring in 2013 and 2015 to the Chinese Heart Sutra as a translation from Sanskrit.
Second, he went and looked at the Sanskrit text, and found it full of errors — errors that were not scribal but editorial. So he stopped being a recommender and became a practitioner. A dozen-plus papers since have all done the same job: finding traces that only a back-translation from Chinese can explain. He and Matthew Orsborn (Huifeng) in Taiwan independently turned up several places where the Sanskrit translator had misread his Chinese source.
At this point a larger question surfaces, and here is his genuinely original contribution: if the most famous Buddhist scripture was assembled, what is left of "the authentic text"?
His answer is not "nothing." It is to move the concept to a different discipline. In the philological sense there is no authentic text — Conze's edition was born in 1948, and there is no evidence any historical Buddhist community used anything like it; the editions by Müller, Conze and Vaidya all differ from one another. Switch to an anthropologist's eye, and the answer is perfectly clear:
The scripture that a community uses is the authentic and authoritative text for that community.The Heart Sutra and the Crisis in Buddhist Philology, 2017-06
In Chinese Buddhism the authentic Heart Sutra is T251, the only version ever commented on since the seventh century. In Japan it is the same Chinese text, pronounced by Japanese convention, which renders it incomprehensible in either language. Tibetan Buddhism canonised the long version instead. Western Buddhists recite one of dozens of English translations, each authentic in its own context.
And where does authority come from? His answer is cold:
Philology plays almost no role in the issue of authority in Buddhist communities. The authority of scripture comes from the collective agreement of people to treat it as authoritative. And that seems to be the extent of it.ibid.
Which explains something he kept running into: in English you may do whatever you like — change the technical terms, interpolate freely to "clarify," punctuate and section the text at will — but altering the Sanskrit is taboo. He identified a mistranslation in the mantra section and proposed emending the Sanskrit back to vidyā; he sent the article to a prominent web-based translator of Chinese texts, who dismissed it out of hand and said he would keep the wrong reading. Huifeng demonstrated that the Sanskrit translator had misread the Chinese, but declined to offer better Sanskrit. Jayarava pressed him by email and, in his words, "got nowhere."
His account of the mechanism is the most portable passage on this page:
Not being able to understand something associated with the exercise of authority (be it economic ideology, or scripture) is treated as a sign that it is profound (as opposed to difficult, complex, or wrong). Confusion produces awe...ibid.
His fix is to replace the whole metaphor. Darwin chose a branching tree for evolution, and a tree branches but never recombines; but texts, like genes, hybridise constantly. So:
That such influence is referred to as "contamination" is revealing of the attitude underlying the philological method. I have proposed (to the void) that we adopt the braided stream as our metaphor for evolution.ibid.
"To the void" is the tone of this blog in three words.
That 2017 essay is titled "The Heart Sutra and the Crisis in Buddhist Philology," and its conclusion is:
In reality, there is no crisis, but there should be one.ibid.
The last stroke came in 2024, and it is the single thing I read that says most about him. After corresponding with an academic, he pulled his claims back in. He listed exactly three propositions as established historical fact: the core passage was copied from Kumarajiva's Chinese; the Sanskrit was translated from a Chinese source; the text enters the historical record in a letter from Xuanzang to the Emperor dated 25 December 656. He had previously argued the Heart Sutra could not predate 654 (on the grounds that it borrowed a dharani from a translation of that year); he now wrote that his interlocutor had offered a not-implausible alternative conjecture, so that one does not go on the list.
Half the value of this one is the conclusion and half is the road to it — because the road is public, on the same blog, eleven years apart, with both versions still up.
The 2008 version. His position then was explicit: karma and rebirth are probably not factually true, but they are useful as a provisional belief. The reasoning was ethical. If I believe death ends everything, then the thought "it won't matter if I get away with it" has no opponent; and the freedom from remorse that Buddhist practice requires has to rest on believing the consequences cannot be escaped.
It is better, ie more helpful, to believe that you cannot escape the consequences of your actions because that will make you more sensitive to how you act in the present.Karma and Rebirth, 2008-04-25
He was still there in 2010, writing in "Am I a Materialist?" that he believed the theory of karma was morally helpful even though its truth value was doubtful.
The first cut came from physics. In October 2014 he watched an award speech by the theoretical physicist Sean Carroll containing the line "we can say, there is no life after death... sorry." That same week a colleague of his wrote about their Buddhist teacher being convinced of rebirth on the strength of certain experiences. He moved Carroll's argument into a Buddhist setting and wrote a long essay, borrowing the title outright: "There is No Life After Death, Sorry."
Carroll's argument is four steps: the mind is the brain; the brain is made of atoms; at the energy, mass and length scales relevant to human beings, we know the physical laws governing atoms; when you die there is no way for the information that was you to persist. The fourth step rests on the second law of thermodynamics.
His own addition is more useful than the argument. It deals with the dualist's standard shield — that spirit is not of the material realm, so empirical methods cannot reach it:
Either the second stuff interacts with matter and energy and can be detected in the usual ways, or if it cannot be detected in the usual ways then it cannot interact with matter and energy... There are no other options.There is No Life After Death, Sorry., 2015-01
He also points out why this bites Buddhists in particular, and the reason is an insider's:
The history of Buddhist ideas is dominated by the problem of continuity: too much and it starts to look like a soul, too little and karma cannot work.ibid.
The second cut is his own, and it is his real original contribution here. He calls it action at a temporal distance.
The structure runs like this. Dependent arising says phenomena arise dependent on conditions and do not arise without them — in the Pali formula, imasmin sati, idaṃ hoti, "when this is, that comes to be." Karma says the fruit you receive today was caused by an act that ceased long ago. Want both, and the ceased cause must somehow still "be," or it cannot function as a condition.
He has laid out the solutions the schools built for this. The Theravada answer was to slice mental life into a stream of very short-lived moments of consciousness, each conditioning the next, with a resting state (bhavaṅgacitta) filling the gaps, and a stipulation that a skilful and an unskilful moment cannot directly follow one another — an indeterminate moment must intervene. The Sarvastivada took the other road and simply declared: if a past act can condition a present result, then it must "exist" in the past; and if a present act will bear fruit in future, it must "exist" in the future. Hence all phenomena exist in all three times — which is where the school's name comes from, sarva-asti-vāda, "the doctrine of always existing."
His verdict: two entirely distinct metaphysics built to explain karma, and neither can accommodate any real discontinuity. And the early texts plainly describe a state called the cessation of mental activity and experience — in which all experience stops. That is a discontinuity.
In fact there seems to be no way to connect impermanent conditions with effects that manifest long after the conditions have ceased without introducing some incoherence. Either we can have experience arising and passing away in the moment, or we can have actions connected to consequences, but not both.Further Problems in Karma Theory: Continuity and Discontinuity, 2015-03
And he adds a line that rescues the argument from being a Westerner's cavil: this is not only my conclusion; it was also the conclusion of Nagarjuna, one of the founding fathers of Mahayana Buddhism, in chapter 17 of his magnum opus.
The 2019 version. Three long essays, titled "Against Karma." This time he no longer says "untrue but useful." He says it is a bad idea.
For 2000 years intellectuals have been tacitly admitting that there is something wrong with the doctrine of karma, with all of them treating it as a good idea that needs to be rescued. In this three-part essay, I take the opposite approach. I argue that that karma is a bad idea.Against Karma, 2019-01
And the underlying lesion is not logical but moral:
Karma is the Buddhist myth of a just world. The just world myth is foundational in most religions. The myth says that everyone gets what they deserve, eventually. The final caveat has to be added because any observer of human life can see that few people, if any, get what they deserve in this life.ibid.
Here is the part that is easy to miss: he rejects karma because karma needs a premise — that some suffering is deserved. He does not accept the premise. He builds up to it from primate reciprocity (de Waal's capuchins, the grape and the cucumber), showing that debit-and-credit moral bookkeeping is native equipment for social mammals, and that karma simply projects that bookkeeping onto a cosmic scale. Then he exposes how absurd the bookkeeping is in human societies: kill a member of your own group and you owe a life; kill enemies and the more you kill the more the group owes you. The same people can demand the execution of murderers and more gratitude for soldiers who kill our enemies — no contradiction, because they never held all human lives to be of equal value.
He does not spare Eden either: "In that story, the only responsible adult present is Yahweh. If anyone should be punished, it's him."
The three essays land on a sentence he is willing to sign:
I do not believe in karma because I do not believe that suffering restores justice; all suffering is unjust and there is no just world to balance it out. [...] Fairness and justice, to the extent they exist at all, are emergent properties of human social interactions.Against Karma: Modern Buddhism, 2019-01
He knows what he is claiming, and reaches for a large comparison:
If I say "Karma is dead" it is of the same order as Nietzsche's pronouncement "God is dead".There is No Life After Death, Sorry., 2015-01
But the conclusion is not nihilist, and this is the point he insists on hardest. He writes the final passage as an explicit handover:
The universe is ordered, but it is not a moral order. It means that if we want to have meaningful lives we have to put the meaning into life ourselves; and not expect to find it in death.ibid.
He has found a traditional name for his position, and rather enjoys it: ucchedavāda, "the doctrine of being cut off at death" — the view early Buddhist literature classes as a wrong view (mithyādṛṣṭi). On his About page he puts his hand up to being an ucchedavādin. And immediately adds: I find this makes human life more precious and more meaningful, not less.
This is the most original of the three, and the one fewest people have followed him on.
His entry point is cognitive linguistics — the conceptual-metaphor apparatus of Lakoff and Johnson. He first puts "empty" back in the family of metaphors it belongs to: containers. "Empty" and "full" only make sense of a container, and in language "empty" is an absolute: if the container holds anything at all, it is not empty.
Then a domestic demonstration. He drinks his morning coffee from a teacup he likes. You could say the cup is empty of tea — it is indeed empty of tea, of water, of lime juice, of cooking oil, of kerosene and of every other liquid — but it currently holds coffee, so it is not empty at all.
The demonstration has a target. The most widely circulated Buddhist clarification of emptiness is exactly this question: here is my cup of water, you say it is not empty because it holds water; I pour the water out, you say it is empty — but empty of what? To be empty is to be empty of something. So we must ask, "Mr Avalokita, empty of what?" His verdict is unsparing:
We can never legitimately ask "empty of what?" The question is meaningless and the answer is simply a restatement of a dogma that doesn't make any sense.On the Cognitive Linguistics of Emptiness, 2022-11
He also shows where "form is emptiness" goes wrong grammatically: it equates two different levels of abstraction. And rūpa ("form") is on the wrong side of the equation to begin with — rūpa is the content of experience, not a container. He has an aphorism for this: "rūpa is to the eye as sound is to the ear." Rupa means appearance, not matter and not body. If emptiness is the absence of content, and rupa is content, the two are logical contraries.
Along the way he takes apart an argument everybody loves — the chariot: dismantle a chariot and the chariot is gone, therefore the chariot never really existed.
If I dismantle my chariot, of course I no longer have a working chariot because I've just broken it on purpose. Who does that? Why would I want to dismantle a working chariot in the first place? And why would my destruction of the thing constitute proof that it never existed in the first place?ibid.
His conclusion: complex objects vanishing under analysis is not a great metaphysical truth, it is an inevitable consequence of methodological reductionism.
All of that is demolition. What is worth real money is what he builds.
He went looking for the earliest technical use of śūnyatā and found it denoting something concrete: the meditative state in which sensory experience has stopped entirely, called suññatāvihāra or śūnyatāsamādhi in the texts. The mechanism is not mysterious: sensory experience depends on attention (manasikāra), so by practising non-attention (amanasikāra) one prevents unarisen sensory experience from arising and causes arisen experience to cease. Between ordinary waking awareness and emptiness lies a series of increasingly attenuated stages. And in this sense the absoluteness of "empty" fits perfectly: while any sensory experience remains, it is not emptiness.
Read this way, the scripture famous for "form is emptiness" is not describing the nature of reality but an achievable state of consciousness. Elsewhere he draws the sharper corollary: nirvāṇa is the state that follows the cessation of sensory experience.
And the provenance of the slogan itself is the most dramatic find in his whole body of work:
I might never have thought of this had I not discovered that the phrase was not originally rūpaṃ śūnyatā "form is emptiness", but rūpaṃ māyā "appearance is illusion".ibid.
"Appearance is illusion" has a family of cognate expressions across the Perfection of Wisdom literature, and Kumarajiva's Chinese renders it plainly. The Pali canon carries the same set of similes — the Pheṇapiṇḍūpama Sutta has appearance like a ball of foam, valence like a bubble, recognition like a mirage, volition like a plantain, discrimination like an illusion. His comment on it is one line: "experience and reality are not the same thing; different rules apply." Everybody understands that, and nobody would argue with it.
Once it became "form is emptiness," it became an ungrammatical slogan. And for two thousand years commentators have taken the bad grammar as evidence of depth — Conze among them, who in his own commentary openly claimed the text was beyond ordinary readers while explaining it in the vocabulary of German Idealism.
There is a restraint in his attitude to all this worth noticing: he does not think Buddhists are lying. His phrasing is that Buddhists propagate the falsehood "in all sincerity."
With a long-running writer, the transferable part is usually the craft rather than the conclusions. His breaks into five moves, each of which can be pointed to in something he actually wrote.
One: always go back to the source text, even for one unremarkable word. This is the first principle of everything he does. His 2018 essay on historical method has a tiny example. Xuanzang's biography has a line about him meeting a sick man; Li Rongxi's English translation reads "with a feeling of pity, he took the man to his monastery and gave him money to purchase clothes and food." Jayarava parses the Chinese himself and finds no "money" and no "purchase": the man was given food, drink and clothing directly.
That one-word difference has consequences in his research: had he trusted the translation, he would have had to go and investigate whether medieval Chinese monks handled money — weeks spent for nothing.
Any reader who does not check the source text (for whatever reason) is always at risk of being misled.Critical Thinking in Buddhist Historiography, 2018-06
His best catch came from this move. In a nineteenth-century English translation from Pali he saw the words "confess" and "we forgive you." He went to the Pali and found no word meaning "confess" and none meaning "forgive." What the Buddha says is taṃ te mayaṃ paṭiggaṇhāma — "we accept that from you," accepting a statement, not absolving a sin. And after the king leaves, the Buddha tells his monks the king is done for. A Victorian translator had smuggled Christian sacramental vocabulary into a text that has no such concept.
Two: details accumulate into a case — and he has to defend this. Because a popular version of "critical thinking" holds that knowledge only advances by refutation, that looking for supporting evidence is pointless, and that one black swan overturns ten thousand white ones.
Keeping track of such small details is integral to this kind of work, because the accumulation of details is what adds up to a case. The only problem is that some intellectuals tell us that no accumulation of details adds up to a case.ibid.
His countermove is to change the standard: don't chase truth, chase the courtroom standard — beyond reasonable doubt. "History is not science, much less abstract philosophy."
Three: don't ask "is it true," ask "how reliable is this witness." Faced with a date in Xuanzang's biography given to the exact day, he neither assumes the authors are lying nor assumes they are honest, but goes looking for both kinds of evidence. He separates two things routinely confused: precision is admirable, but the whole event could still be invented — high precision, zero accuracy.
The trick is not to ask is it true or false... In this sense, good history is naturally Bayesian in its approach.ibid.
Four: go after your opponent's axioms, not just their argument. This is his most distinctive move, and his heaviest charge against the whole field. He says he has watched many moderns try to come to grips with Nagarjuna's method, with evident relish for the experience of confusion —
I have yet to come across a single published attempt to identify, let alone assess the validity of, the axioms that Nāgārjuna takes for granted. As far as I can see, some of them are demonstrably false, and that undermines the whole enterprise.The Heart Sutra and the Crisis in Buddhist Philology, 2017-06
Five: demote your own signature tool. This is the most surprising one. The philologist's standard opening move is an etymology. In 2023 he wrote an entire essay, "The Emptiness of Etymology," arguing that etymology is nearly useless for explaining how a word is currently used. And the first person he indicts is himself:
It is de rigueur to begin an essay about a Buddhist technical term with an etymology... I have often done this myself because I learned to write academic essays by reading hundreds of them and it's a very common practice.The Emptiness of Etymology, 2023-03
His example is the English word "nice." You can trace it to Proto-Indo-European, where the oldest recoverable sense is "ignorant" (nescient). And then? Thirteenth century: foolish, frivolous. Fourteenth: fussy, fastidious. Sixteenth: precise, careful. Eighteenth: agreeable, delightful. Nineteenth: kind, thoughtful. Twenty-first: twee, bland. At virtually any point in history, the etymology tells you almost nothing about how the word is used.
The order he proposes instead is: consult an expert (a dictionary or grammar is an expert in fossilised form) → look at actual usage in context → and only then etymology. He took the middle step to an extreme: to settle the meaning of paṭikaroti, he read every single occurrence of the word in the Pali suttas. His summary of that exercise may be the best line of method on the whole site:
In this case consulting the experts failed and I had to become the expert.ibid.
Incidentally, the epigraph he keeps on his About page is well chosen, from the linguist Roman Jakobson: "Philology is the art of reading slowly." So is the aphorism he wrote himself: "The great lesson of history is that no one ever learns the lessons of history."
The largest tension is one he named himself. In October 2024 he published "The False Allure of Origins," arguing that the quest for origins is fundamentally flawed as a way of knowing: origins often cannot be located, and when they can they are often uninformative. He uses rivers — you can never point at a spot and call it the river's origin, because a river's origin is in the water cycle, and "Where is the origin? It is nowhere."
The man writing that had just spent twelve years chasing the origin of a scripture.
He has a defence available: he is not chasing an origin in deep prehistory but a seventh-century Chinese document with firm dates, inscriptions, catalogues and commentaries — a paper trail. What he objects to is the move from origin straight to present meaning. The distinction holds. But two things are true at once: the distinction needs him to state it, and in that essay he does not. He examines the etymological fallacy, the urtext fallacy, the evolutionary tree fallacy and the "original Buddhism" fallacy — and never turns the mirror on his own project.
Second, his treatment of Nagarjuna exceeds the strength of his evidence. The verdict runs:
I can see no good reason to take Nāgārjuna seriously as a philosopher or even, frankly, as a Buddhist. He seems to have entirely missed the point of Buddhism and has gone off on a tangent.On the Cognitive Linguistics of Emptiness, 2022-11
The core claim propping it up is that nobody ever believed in self-creating phenomena, that Nagarjuna said everybody did, and that "Nāgārjuna appears to have lied about this." That is a universal negative about a largely lost literature — precisely the form of argument he warns against elsewhere. He has himself written that the destruction of Buddhism in India cost us the bulk of the texts, and that what we think we know about the various sects often comes from polemics written by their opponents. So what supports "nobody ever held X"? He does not say.
Third, he admits a personal element in the Conze case. That is to his credit, and worth recording:
I have a certain amount of animus towards bullies but I'm mostly just shocked by the disparity between the poor quality of Conze's work and the superlatives that continue to be heaped on him. I'm more motivated by trying to resolve the cognitive dissonance created by this disparity than about hatred of Conze.If You Meet Conze on the Road, Set Fire To Him, 2021-04
That essay's title comes from Avicenna's prescription for people who deny the law of non-contradiction — burn him, beat him, starve him until he concedes that burning differs from not burning. It is funny. It also flags a problem: a critic who explicitly describes his own motive as resolving cognitive dissonance is not a neutral instrument for judging how bad someone is. His specific charges about the quality of Conze's scholarship — the grammatical error in the 1948 edition, the mistranslation in the mantra section — are independently checkable and have nothing to do with his motives. The two need separating, and his prose sometimes binds them together.
Fourth, a structural blind spot, which he has pointed out himself. He does not read Japanese. And he states plainly that a large share of the relevant scholarship is published in Japanese and barely reaches the English-speaking world — Nattier's 1992 article itself clearly relies on Japanese work.
The blind spot caught him once, and he recorded it honestly: in 2016 he blogged about "the earliest dated Heart Sutra," while in Chinese academic circles an older witness had been common knowledge for nearly sixty years. He did not find out for another two years.
History is not only written by the winners, but it is rewritten by the better informed amongst the winners' descendents.Critical Thinking in Buddhist Historiography, 2018-06
Fifth, he turned the comments off. His reason — that almost nobody reads carefully enough — is probably true. But the consequence is that a man whose professional ethic is "never trust anything second-hand" has put a filter on his own work that disables the cheapest available error-correction channel. He is clear-eyed about his own position: he has written that a dissenting voice inside a religious community can at best hope to "provide ammo for more charismatic group members" rather than shift the collective will directly. That is an honest self-assessment. It is also a costly one.
One note on criticism of him. He mentions that Dan Lusthaus and Huifeng (Matthew Orsborn) have raised concerns about Nattier's thesis, and that Fukui, Harada and Ishii have published polemics against the Chinese-origins argument. I have not read any of those originals, so this page reports the bibliographic fact only, and neither restates nor evaluates their arguments.
The page's other citations come, in order, from Karma and Rebirth (2008-04-25), To be or not to be: the problem with ontology (2008-10-31), Buddhism and Western Philosophy: the Fundamental Mismatch (2009-03-20), Am I a Materialist? (2010-07), Of Miracles (2011-12), Further Problems in Karma Theory: Continuity and Discontinuity (2015-03), Critical Thinking in Buddhist Historiography (2018-06), Against Karma: Suffering and Justice (2019-01), Against Karma: Modern Buddhism (2019-01), If You Meet Conze on the Road, Set Fire To Him (2021-04), The Emptiness of Etymology (2023-03), What Have We Proven About the Heart Sutra? (2024-09) and The False Allure of Origins (2024-10), plus his About page (self-description, position labels and collected aphorisms). Blog home: jayarava.blogspot.com.