Zhuan Falun

The work began as speech. In the early 1990s Li Hongzhi delivered lecture series in Chinese cities, running over several days at a time, and the printed book was assembled from those sessions. The oral origin remains visible in the finished text: it addresses an audience directly, returns to points already made, and answers questions of the kind that arise in a room rather than on a page. Reading it is closer to attending a course than to consulting a treatise. It appeared in book form at the start of 1995 and sold in very large numbers in China, before official publication there was halted in the second half of the decade.

Distribution then moved outside commercial channels, and the practice's own organisations have made the text and its translations available at no charge, including online, which is unusual for a work still under copyright and is a deliberate policy rather than an accident of enforcement. The atlas records what can be established about the book's composition, publication and circulation from published scholarship on the movement. Its wording remains under copyright and is neither reproduced nor closely paraphrased here, which is the standing rule for modern scripture still held by a living rights holder, and it applies to this text in exactly the way it applies to any other work in the same position.

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.