The public as well as ecologists are aware that biodiversity is declining worldwide. This has led ecologists to study the relationship between biodiversity and ecosystem stability. As a result, there is now mounting evidence supporting the hypothesis that increased diversity stabilizes ecosystem functions; however, the mechanisms underlying diversity and stability are still poorly understood. In this study, we first introduce a brief history of biodiversity and ecological stability research. Then, to explain the main mechanisms that may drive the relationship between biodiversity and stability, three terms derived from the algorithmic formula for temporal stability are introduced: total community properties, summed variance, and summed covariance. Finally, we review relevant discussions of biodiversity and stability. Based on this review, we concluded that a more robust hypothesis about the relationship between biodiversity and ecological stability must be developed, and that this hypothesis should rely on data collected via additional long-term empirical experiments and meta-analyses. Furthermore, the key to testing the mechanisms underlying the biodiversity-stability relationship should be the relationships among non-biomass/abundance properties, diversity, and the manipulation of species attributes, rather than species abundance alone.