Study Alongside Practice, and the Book Under Suppression

Within Falun Gong the text is not treated as background reading to a set of exercises. Practitioners study it repeatedly and in company, and the movement's own account holds that the physical exercises without the teaching are incomplete, which places the book at the centre of the practice rather than beside it. Scholars of the movement describe the relationship between reading and exercise as the feature that distinguishes it from the many other health cultivation systems circulating in China in the same period. That centrality became a political fact.

Falun Gong grew very rapidly in the 1990s, and from 1999 the Chinese state suppressed the movement, banning its organisations and its literature. The book has continued to circulate outside China and in translation, and possession and distribution of it inside China have carried serious consequences since. The atlas records this as the history of a text under prohibition, which is a recurring subject in a reference work about religion and not a special case. It also records the copyright position, which is why this entry describes the book's role, its form and its circulation rather than its contents, and directs a reader who wants the teaching itself to the publisher's own editions.