Falun Gong presents itself as a cultivation practice rather than a religion, and what it asks of a practitioner falls into two parts that its own teaching ranks in a definite order.
Five sets of movements
Four standing exercises and one seated meditation, taught free of charge and performed in public parks where that is possible. They are slow, repetitive and drawn from the qigong forms that were widespread in China in the 1980s and 1990s, and this is the part that most outside observers see. Within the teaching the exercises are explicitly secondary.
Xinxing
The primary work is on xinxing, which the tradition renders as heart-mind nature or moral character, organised around truthfulness, compassion and forbearance. Advancement is held to depend on this rather than on the exercises, and includes giving up attachments, accepting hardship as the working off of karma, and abstaining from the ordinary pursuit of status. The founder's teaching also sets out an account of the cosmos, of karma as a substance, and of a coming reckoning, and the movement's own literature does not treat these as metaphor.
Nineteen ninety-nine
On 25 April 1999 some ten thousand practitioners assembled outside Zhongnanhai, the leadership compound in Beijing, to petition after arrests in Tianjin. It was silent and orderly and it was the largest unauthorised gathering in the capital since 1989. A suppression campaign began in July of that year and has continued since. The atlas records what the practice consists of and what has been done to those who follow it, and does not instruct in either.