A Claim About the Universe Rather Than a Code

The three characters are ordinary Chinese words and the claim made for them is not ordinary. In the teaching set out in Zhuan Falun, truthfulness, compassion and forbearance are not values a community has adopted but the fundamental nature of the cosmos itself, the standard by which everything is measured whether or not anyone knows it. A person who acts against them is not breaking a rule but moving out of alignment with what is actually there.

The mechanism by which this is said to work is described in material terms. Virtue and karma are treated as substances that accumulate around a person, karma acquired by wrongdoing and virtue by suffering endured without complaint or by acting well at a cost. Cultivation transforms one into the other, and forbearance in particular is presented as the operation by which that transformation occurs, which is why an insult borne without retaliation is described as a gain rather than a loss.

The word the teaching uses for the thing being cultivated is xinxing, a term from earlier Chinese religious vocabulary usually rendered as heart and mind nature or moral character. Raising xinxing is presented as the primary practice, and the five sets of exercises for which the movement is publicly best known are described as secondary, working on the body while the real work goes on in ordinary life among other people.