Five Exercises, and What They Are Subordinate To

Falun Gong's five exercises are the visible part of the practice and, by its own teaching, the lesser part. Four are performed standing, with slow arm movements and held postures, and the fifth is a seated meditation. They carry names given by Li Hongzhi and are performed to a fixed accompaniment, often in groups and often outdoors.

What the teaching insists on is the ranking. The practice's core is described as cultivation of character according to three principles rendered in English as truthfulness, compassion and forbearance, and the exercises are presented as supporting that cultivation rather than constituting it. A practitioner who performed the movements without the moral cultivation would, in this account, not be practising Falun Gong at all. David Ownby's study of the movement and Benjamin Penny's account of its religious content both stress that this ordering is not a rhetorical softening but structural to the teaching.

That is a genuine difference from most of the qigong systems Falun Gong emerged among, which offered health and energy benefits without a comprehensive moral and cosmological framework. Instructional detail for performing the exercises is disseminated by Falun Gong itself, free of charge, and is not reconstructed here.