A Living Tradition of East Asia

In the spring of 1992, in the northeastern Chinese city of Changchun, Jilin Province, a forty-year-old man named Li Hongzhi began teaching a new qigong practice. China was in the midst of a qigong fever — a mass enthusiasm for traditional breathing, meditation, and energy cultivation exercises that had swept the country since the late 1970s, when the post-Mao government relaxed restrictions on traditional practices and millions of Chinese citizens, disillusioned with Marxist materialism, turned to qigong masters for health, meaning, and the recovery of a spiritual vocabulary that the Cultural Revolution had attempted to destroy. Li's system, which he called Falun Gong (法轮功, "Law Wheel Practice") or Falun Dafa (法轮大法, "Great Law of the Law Wheel"), was one among hundreds of qigong schools — but it was different in ways that would prove decisive.

Where most qigong schools emphasized physical health and the cultivation of supernatural powers (特异功能), Li Hongzhi taught that the purpose of practice was moral transformation. The universe, he said, has a fundamental nature expressed in three characters: Zhen (真, Truthfulness), Shan (善, Compassion), and Ren (忍, Forbearance). To practice Falun Dafa was to align oneself with this nature — not primarily through the five sets of gentle exercises, though these were important, but through the constant, rigorous cultivation of virtue in daily life: letting go of attachments, enduring hardship without complaint, telling the truth, treating others with genuine compassion. The exercises were a method; the character was the goal.

Within seven years, by the Chinese government's own estimates, between 70 and 100 million people were practicing Falun Dafa in China — more than the membership of the Chinese Communist Party. On July 20, 1999, the state launched a comprehensive campaign to eradicate the practice, labeling it a dangerous cult, arresting practitioners by the hundreds of thousands, and initiating what multiple international human rights organizations have documented as one of the most extensive religious persecutions of the modern era. Li Hongzhi, who had moved to the United States in 1998, was placed on China's most-wanted list. The practice went underground in China and, simultaneously, global: Falun Dafa groups now exist in over 100 countries. This profile attempts to describe the teaching, the practice, the community, and the persecution — and to place the movement in the broader Aquarian context.

I. The Founder — Li Hongzhi and the Qigong Fever

Li Hongzhi (李洪志) was born on May 13, 1951 (or July 7, 1952 — the date is disputed; the Falun Dafa community uses May 13, which coincides with the birthday of Sakyamuni Buddha in some East Asian calendars, while critics note that his official government records show 1952). He was born in Gongzhuling, Jilin Province, in China's industrial northeast. Almost nothing about his early life is independently verifiable: the community's accounts describe him as having received instruction in cultivation practices from multiple masters beginning in childhood, while Chinese government accounts describe him as an unremarkable former grain warehouse clerk and military musician.

What is verifiable is the context. China in the 1980s and early 1990s was experiencing what scholars have called the qigong boom (气功热) — a mass popular movement in which tens of millions of Chinese citizens practiced various forms of traditional breathing, meditation, and energy cultivation exercises in public parks, community centers, and open squares every morning. The movement had powerful state patronage: senior Party members endorsed qigong, the Chinese Academy of Sciences investigated qigong phenomena, and qigong masters with large followings were treated as national celebrities. The boom was simultaneously a health movement, a spiritual revival, and a mass reclamation of traditional Chinese culture after the devastation of the Cultural Revolution.

Li Hongzhi introduced Falun Gong on May 13, 1992, at a lecture in Changchun. Over the next two years, he toured China, giving fifty-four lecture series in cities across the country. The lectures were free or charged nominal fees (the organization would later make all materials available for free online, a policy that persists). The lectures were also, by all accounts, enormously popular: halls were packed, and the practice spread rapidly through word of mouth. In 1995, Li published Zhuan Falun (转法轮, "Turning the Law Wheel"), the principal text of Falun Dafa, which compiles and systematizes his lecture teachings into a single volume. Zhuan Falun became one of the best-selling books in China.

Several factors distinguished Falun Dafa from other qigong schools and account for its extraordinary growth:

First, the moral emphasis. Where most qigong schools focused on health benefits and the development of special powers, Li Hongzhi explicitly taught that moral cultivation (xinxing, 心性, "heart-nature" or "mind-character") was the foundation of the practice. Attachment to supernatural powers, to fame, to material gain — these were obstacles, not goals. The Three Principles — Truthfulness, Compassion, Forbearance — were not abstractions but daily requirements: tell the truth even when it costs you; endure unfair treatment without bitterness; treat others better than they treat you.

Second, the accessibility. The five sets of exercises could be learned in a few hours and practiced by anyone regardless of age or physical condition. There were no fees, no membership requirements, no organizational hierarchy. Practice sites were informal gatherings in public parks where experienced practitioners taught newcomers for free. There was no clergy, no initiation ritual, no formal structure.

Third, the cosmology. Li Hongzhi's lectures presented a sweeping cosmology that synthesized Buddhist and Daoist concepts — karma (业力), virtue (德), the Dharma body (法身), celestial eyes (天目), cultivation levels (层次) — into a framework that was sophisticated enough to engage educated practitioners and accessible enough for everyone else. The universe was described as having been created by a supreme being; multiple dimensions exist simultaneously; the human body contains energy systems that can be activated through cultivation; and the purpose of human life is to cultivate back to one's original, true self — to return, through moral and spiritual discipline, to a state of purity that has been lost through accumulated karma over many lifetimes.

By 1998, the practice had an estimated 70 to 100 million adherents in China. The number is disputed — the Chinese government initially used the 70 million figure, then revised it downward after deciding to persecute the movement — but even conservative estimates place the number at tens of millions. Falun Dafa was, by the late 1990s, the largest voluntary organization in China outside the Communist Party itself.

II. The Teachings — Zhen, Shan, Ren

The doctrinal heart of Falun Dafa is the assertion that the universe has a fundamental moral nature, and that this nature can be expressed in three Chinese characters:

• Zhen (真) — Truthfulness. Honesty, integrity, the refusal to deceive oneself or others.
• Shan (善) — Compassion. Kindness, benevolence, genuine care for others' well-being.
• Ren (忍) — Forbearance. Endurance, tolerance, the capacity to bear suffering without generating resentment or hatred.

These three qualities are understood not as human moral ideals but as cosmic properties — the very fabric of the universe. A being who cultivates Zhen-Shan-Ren is not merely becoming a better person; they are aligning their fundamental nature with the nature of the cosmos. Conversely, a being who acts against these principles — through lying, cruelty, or impatience — is generating karma and moving further from their original, true nature.

Zhuan Falun, the principal text, is structured as a nine-lecture series addressing the core teachings: the nature of qigong and cultivation; the concept of the celestial eye (天目); the law of loss and gain (失与得); the relationship between virtue (德, white matter) and karma (业, black matter); the dangers of attachment; the role of the Master; and the progressive levels of cultivation through which a practitioner ascends. The text is dense with cosmological detail — descriptions of multiple dimensions, of the structure of the Milky Way, of the mechanisms by which karma accumulates and is dissolved — but the ethical core is simple: become a genuinely good person, and the universe will respond.

The karma mechanism is central. In Falun Dafa teaching, every act of wrongdoing generates karma — a substance (described in some passages as a kind of black matter) that accumulates around the body and blocks spiritual progress. Karma is dissolved through suffering — illness, misfortune, social hardship — and through cultivation. When a practitioner endures suffering without complaining, without retaliating, without generating new karma through anger or resentment, the karmic substance is transformed into virtue (a white matter, 德). The transformation of karma into virtue is the fundamental mechanism of spiritual progress.

This teaching has practical implications that are immediately visible in the community. Practitioners who fall ill are encouraged to understand the illness as a karmic process — the dissolution of past karma through present suffering. The community's approach to medicine is complex and sometimes controversial: practitioners are not formally prohibited from seeking medical treatment, but the teaching emphasizes that illness has spiritual causes and that cultivation can resolve what medicine cannot. In practice, some practitioners choose to forgo medical treatment in favor of intensive practice, a choice that has produced both remarkable recoveries and tragic outcomes, and which has been a significant point of criticism.

III. The Five Exercises

The physical practice of Falun Dafa consists of five sets of exercises (功法), four standing and one seated:

1. Buddha Showing a Thousand Hands (佛展千手法) — A standing warm-up exercise involving slow stretching movements with the arms extended, designed to open the body's energy channels.

2. Falun Standing Stance (法轮桩法) — Four static standing postures held for extended periods, with arms raised in various positions as if embracing a wheel. This exercise develops energy and endurance.

3. Penetrating the Two Cosmic Extremes (贯通两极法) — Gentle up-and-down movements of the hands along the body's central axis, designed to purify the body by exchanging good and bad energy with the cosmos.

4. Falun Heavenly Circuit (法轮周天法) — Tracing the hands along the body's energy channels, facilitating the circulation of energy through the complete celestial circuit.

5. Strengthening Divine Powers (神通加持法) — The only seated exercise (in full lotus or half-lotus position), involving extended meditation with specific hand positions (jieyin, the conjoined-hands gesture). This is the primary meditation exercise and can be practiced for extended periods.

The exercises are gentle, meditative, and can be practiced by people of virtually any age or physical condition. They are performed to recorded meditation music. In China, before the persecution, the exercises were practiced communally in public parks every morning, with groups ranging from a handful to several thousand practitioners at major sites. The visual impression — hundreds of people in quiet, synchronized slow movement in a public park at dawn — became one of the iconic images of the qigong era.

All exercise instruction, including video demonstrations and the exercise music, is available for free on the Falun Dafa website (falundafa.org). The insistence on free availability — no fees, no paid instructors, no commercial products — is a point of identity for the community.

IV. The Persecution

On April 25, 1999, approximately 10,000 Falun Gong practitioners gathered silently outside Zhongnanhai, the Communist Party's leadership compound in Beijing, to appeal for the release of practitioners who had been arrested in Tianjin and for the legal right to practice freely. The gathering was silent, orderly, and dispersed peacefully after Premier Zhu Rongji met with representatives. It was also the largest public demonstration at Zhongnanhai since the 1989 Tiananmen protests — and it alarmed the Party leadership profoundly.

On July 20, 1999, the Chinese government launched a comprehensive campaign to eradicate Falun Gong. The campaign was led by a newly created extralegal body, the 610 Office (named for its founding date of June 10, 1999), which operated outside the normal legal system and was given authority to coordinate the suppression across all government agencies. The campaign included:

• Mass arrests. Hundreds of thousands of practitioners were detained. The exact number is unknown; estimates from human rights organizations range from hundreds of thousands to over a million at various points during the campaign.

• Propaganda. State media launched a sustained campaign portraying Falun Gong as a dangerous cult (xiejiao, 邪教, literally "evil teaching"), attributing deaths and injuries to the practice, and broadcasting confessions from former practitioners.

• Labor camps. Practitioners who refused to renounce the practice were sent to laogai (reform-through-labor) camps, where they were subjected to forced labor, political re-education, and — according to extensive testimony gathered by international human rights organizations — systematic physical abuse.

• The self-immolation incident. On January 23, 2001, five people set themselves on fire in Tiananmen Square. Chinese state media immediately identified them as Falun Gong practitioners and broadcast the footage extensively as evidence of the practice's danger. Falun Gong denied any connection to the incident and presented detailed analyses arguing that the footage was staged. The incident remains intensely disputed; it was effective in shifting Chinese public opinion against the practice.

• Organ harvesting allegations. Beginning in 2006, former Canadian Secretary of State David Kilgour and human rights lawyer David Matas published research alleging that the Chinese government was harvesting organs from living Falun Gong prisoners on a large scale for the transplant market. The allegations, supported by subsequent investigations including the 2019 independent China Tribunal chaired by Sir Geoffrey Nice QC, concluded that forced organ harvesting had taken place "on a substantial scale" and that Falun Gong practitioners were "probably the main source." The Chinese government has denied the allegations. The China Tribunal's findings have been cited by multiple governments and international bodies.

The persecution has been documented by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the United Nations Committee Against Torture, the U.S. Congressional-Executive Commission on China, and numerous other international bodies. It is, by scale and duration, one of the most extensive campaigns of religious persecution in the modern era.

V. The Diaspora — Falun Dafa Outside China

Li Hongzhi left China in 1998 and settled in the New York area, where he has remained. Since the persecution, the center of gravity of the visible Falun Dafa movement has shifted outside China — though practitioners inside China continue to practice clandestinely, produce and distribute literature, and face ongoing risk of arrest.

The diaspora community has built a significant organizational infrastructure:

• Practice sites exist in over 100 countries. The practice remains free, taught by volunteers, with no formal organizational hierarchy.

• Media organizations. The community has founded several media outlets, including The Epoch Times (a multilingual newspaper and website), New Tang Dynasty Television (NTD), and the Sound of Hope radio network. These outlets cover general news with a particular focus on China, human rights, and the persecution.

• Shen Yun Performing Arts. Founded in 2006, Shen Yun is a touring dance and music company that presents classical Chinese dance with the stated mission of reviving traditional Chinese culture. It has become a major global touring enterprise, performing in hundreds of cities annually. The shows incorporate Falun Dafa themes, including scenes depicting the persecution, alongside classical Chinese stories and legends.

• Tian Guo Marching Band. A community marching band that participates in parades and public events worldwide.

The relationship between the spiritual practice and these organizational extensions is complex and sometimes contested. Critics argue that the media organizations and Shen Yun function as political and financial arms of the movement; the community maintains that they are independent expressions of the traditional Chinese culture that the Communist Party sought to destroy.

VI. Controversies and Criticisms

Falun Dafa has attracted criticism from several directions beyond the Chinese state narrative:

The Master's authority. Li Hongzhi's teachings include cosmological claims that are difficult to evaluate from outside the system — descriptions of alien civilizations, of the mechanisms by which human beings were created, of the spiritual dangers of modern technology and mixed-race marriage. Some of these teachings have been criticized as unscientific, conspiratorial, or socially conservative. The community responds that the teachings must be understood in their full context and that isolated passages taken out of context distort the meaning.

Medical concerns. As noted above, the teaching's emphasis on karma as the cause of illness and cultivation as the remedy has led some practitioners to refuse medical treatment, with occasionally fatal results. The community maintains that the practice does not prohibit medical treatment but acknowledges that individual practitioners make their own choices.

Political alignment. The diaspora community's media organizations have been criticized for adopting politically conservative positions, particularly in the United States, that appear to extend beyond the practice's core spiritual teachings. The relationship between the spiritual practice and the political activism of its associated organizations is a live debate both within and outside the community.

Organizational structure. While the practice presents itself as having no formal hierarchy, critics observe that Li Hongzhi exercises enormous informal authority through his published teachings (jingwen, 经文, "scriptures"), which practitioners treat as authoritative guidance on matters ranging from spiritual practice to current events. The degree to which this constitutes a conventional master-disciple authority structure, despite the absence of formal institutional hierarchy, is debated by scholars.

VII. Falun Dafa and the Aquarian Phenomenon

Falun Dafa occupies a singular position in the Aquarian map — and its story illuminates something essential about the Aquarian phenomenon itself.

The movement emerged from the same soil that produced every other major Chinese new religious movement of the modern era: the catastrophic disruption of traditional Chinese spiritual culture by the political upheavals of the twentieth century — the fall of the Qing dynasty, the May Fourth Movement's assault on tradition, the Japanese invasion, the Communist revolution, and above all the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), which systematically destroyed temples, burned scriptures, persecuted monks and priests, and attempted to eradicate religious practice from Chinese life entirely. The qigong boom of the 1980s and 1990s was, in its deepest structure, a mass attempt to recover what had been destroyed — to find, in traditional Chinese practices of body cultivation and meditation, a spiritual vocabulary that Marxist materialism could not provide.

Falun Dafa was the most successful product of that recovery — and the state's decision to destroy it was, in a sense, the second Cultural Revolution's assault on the same spiritual impulse that the first Cultural Revolution had failed to kill. The Aquarian pattern — spiritual renewal arising from cultural destruction, new revelation emerging from the ruins of suppressed tradition, the democratic impulse to make the highest teachings freely available to everyone — is nowhere more visible than in this Chinese qigong movement that grew to rival the Communist Party itself.

The parallels with other persecuted Aquarian movements are instructive. The Bahá'ís in Iran, the Ahmadiyya in Pakistan, the Falun Dafa in China — in each case, a state perceived a new spiritual movement as a threat to its monopoly on meaning and responded with comprehensive persecution. In each case, the persecution drove the movement into diaspora and, paradoxically, accelerated its global spread. The pattern suggests that the Aquarian impulse — the demand for direct spiritual experience, for moral transformation, for free access to truth — is genuinely threatening to authoritarian structures, not because it is political but because it offers an alternative source of meaning and community that the state cannot control.

Colophon

This ethnographic profile was researched and composed for the Good Work Library's Living Traditions series in March 2026. Sources consulted include: David Ownby, Falun Gong and the Future of China (Oxford, 2008); Benjamin Penny, The Religion of Falun Gong (Chicago, 2012); the Falun Dafa Information Center (faluninfo.net); the official Falun Dafa website (falundafa.org); the China Tribunal Final Judgment (chinatribunal.com, 2019); the World Religions and Spirituality Project (WRSP) entry on Falun Gong; the Congressional-Executive Commission on China Annual Reports (2001–2024); Amnesty International reports on Falun Gong persecution; and various academic studies of the Chinese qigong movement.

Compiled and formatted for the Good Work Library by the New Tianmu Anglican Church, 2026.

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