Over the past decade and more, Himalayan works of art have garnered immense reverence and fervent bidding activity at auction houses including Sotheby’s, Christie’s and Bonhams, with their market values climbing steadily to unprecedented heights. Fueled by growing enthusiasm within European and American cultural circles, trading volumes for Himalayan religious art and craftworks have surged to an exceptionally buoyant level.

On one hand, we witness spontaneous, enthusiastic cultural exchange between Eastern and Western civilizations unfolding spontaneously. On the other hand, amid mounting global volatility—from widespread wars and pandemics to a steadily deteriorating worldwide economic landscape—it is palpable that ordinary people across nations are teetering on the brink of mental breakdown under immense psychological strain. Escalating inequity in resource allocation and rigidifying social stratification inevitably fuel drastic unrest at societal, national and global levels. Yet are social systems and national legislations truly the sole root cause of all such turmoil? We face frictions on every front: interpersonal strife, tensions between livelihood and economics, oppression versus resistance, political and economic conflicts, and clashes between sovereign states. If we examine the two World Wars of modern human history alongside the cyclical rise and fall of dynasties spanning China’s several-millennia-long civilization, an underlying truth emerges clearly: nearly all such crises trace their fundamental origin back to one profoundly metaphysical concept: human nature.

Nearly 1,800 years ago, China descended into chaos in the late Eastern Han Dynasty, splitting into the Three Kingdoms vying for dominion over the Central Plains. Liu Bei, founding emperor of the Shu Han state, already posited back then that all conflicts, upheavals and wars stemmed fundamentally from the moral degeneration of human nature. The age-old adage holds that unity inevitably yields to division, and division will in turn revert to unity over time. At its core, human nature itself has persisted across millennia, with humanity’s inherent good and evil never undergoing fundamental transformation. Against this backdrop, all contemporary global disputes are hardly surprising; they represent nothing more than history repeating itself in an endless cycle, destined to recur until the end of the world.

The five-millennia legacy of Eastern civilization holds profound lessons worthy of global reference, and its distilled essence can be summed up in three words: Confucianism, Buddhism and Taoism. We firmly believe that if people around the world can show basic reverence for these three great traditions, engage in modest study of their teachings, and integrate even a fraction of their wisdom into daily life, the world will grow markedly more harmonious, civilizations will avoid collapse or extinction, and humanity will secure a far more sustainable future on this planet.

Consider the extreme El Niño phenomenon unfolding today: nature is already meting out its reckoning. The fall of Atlantis, recounted in Western cultural mythology, stands as a sobering cautionary tale from a mere few thousand years in the past. Could all of this not be attributed to collective karmic debt borne by humanity, alongside fatal inherent flaws embedded within human nature itself?