Exercises and Study, Not Conventional Prayer

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.