The Religion of Falun Gong

Benjamin Penny is a historian at the Australian National University with no affiliation to Falun Gong, to the Chinese state, or to any advocacy body on either side of the movement's suppression, and this book was published by an independent university press. It is treated in religious studies literature as a standard academic account of Falun Gong's teachings, its practice of qigong exercise and meditation, and the movement's own account of Li Hongzhi's revelations, read as a religious system in its own right rather than filtered primarily through the political conflict surrounding its 1999 ban in China. The book draws on Li Hongzhi's own published lectures and texts, read critically rather than reproduced as the movement's voice, and on the wider scholarly literature on Chinese qigong movements from which Falun Gong emerged. This record has not independently traced a documented history of scholarly rebuttal to Penny's specific claims. Use it for Falun Gong's teachings, practice and religious self understanding; a claim about the conduct or scale of the Chinese government's suppression needs a human rights or documentary source alongside it.