Falun Gong Prayer and Invocation Tradition

This entry records that Falun Gong, a spiritual practice founded by Li Hongzhi in China in 1992 combining meditation and physical exercises with moral teaching drawing on Buddhist and Daoist concepts, structures its devotional life primarily around specific physical exercise sequences and study of Li Hongzhi's written teachings, most centrally the book Zhuan Falun, rather than around prayer or invocation in the form more familiar from many other traditions catalogued in this atlas, and this entry does not reproduce the specific content of Falun Gong's exercises or teachings here.

Falun Gong's core stated principles, generally translated as truthfulness, compassion and forbearance, function as the practice's central ethical framework, understood by practitioners as principles to be cultivated through both the physical exercises and ongoing moral self-reflection rather than through prayer addressed to a specific deity in a conventional devotional sense. Falun Gong practitioners describe their practice as xiulian, a term shared with broader Chinese cultivation traditions and referring to a combined process of moral and physical self-cultivation, distinguishing the movement's self-understanding from both conventional Western categories of religion and from purely secular exercise or fitness practice.

The Chinese government banned Falun Gong in 1999 and has since conducted a sustained campaign against it that international human rights organizations, journalists and numerous governments have documented as including mass detention, and credible reporting has raised serious allegations of torture and forced organ harvesting affecting practitioners, making Falun Gong's contemporary situation one of active, serious and internationally documented human rights concern rather than a settled historical matter, a context this entry treats as directly relevant to why careful, accurate general description matters considerably more here than detailed reproduction of specific exercise or teaching content.

Falun Gong continues to be practiced by adherents outside mainland China, including significant communities in Taiwan, Hong Kong prior to more recent restrictions there, and across the wider global Chinese diaspora, and Li Hongzhi's written teachings, including Zhuan Falun, remain published and available through the movement's own channels for readers seeking direct access to its specific content rather than a general summary. The scale and severity of the allegations against Chinese state treatment of Falun Gong practitioners have made the movement a recurring subject of formal reporting by bodies including the United States Congress and various United Nations human rights mechanisms, distinguishing its contemporary situation from most other new religious movements catalogued in this atlas.