Liyu Hua is a historian of religion of South Asia. His research on Buddhist commentaries explores the scholastic interactions between Buddhists and the Brahmanical tradition in the first millennium South Asia, with a special focus on the formation of language ideologies in the Pali commentaries and the Abhidharma tradition in the northwest. He also studies the narrative commentaries in the Pali canon, which inspires his teaching of Buddhist narratives and South Asian literature. His work on Buddhist commentarial traditions aims to explore how commentaries demonstrate human agency across various socio-historical contexts and serve various ideological and aesthetic purposes in the history of religion.
Liyu Hua is also translating Ruyyaka's Alaṃkārasarvasva from Sanskrit into Chinese as part of “The Translation and Study of the Fundamental Texts of Indian Classical Sanskrit Literature and Art,” a project supported by the Major Program of the National Social Science Foundation of China.
