The best-known trope associated with Falun Gong as a historical phenomenon is likely that moment in April 1999 when some ten thousand adherents silently gathered in protest at the gates to the Zhongnanhai residential compound in Beijing, home to most of China's central leadership. Receiving reports about this “besiegement,” Jiang Zemin is said to have asked (with, one might imagine, considerable consternation), “What is Falun Gong?” (p. 2). Others have raised this question as well, generating an outpouring of articles, Web postings, and books—of varying reliability and explanatory value—that seek to pin it down.
Benjamin Penny's terrific new book, The Religion of Falun Gong, demonstrates the continued importance of this question. By examining the movement within the context of the history of Chinese religions, Penny explores dimensions of Falun Gong that previously have been obscured, ignored, or insufficiently engaged. The result, building on previous scholarship and a mountain of primary source materials, is a considerably amplified and multidimensional view of a very important phenomenon in recent Chinese history.
The most significant recent books that focus on this phenomenon include David Palmer's highly articulate Qigong Fever: Body, Science, and Utopia in China (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), which examines Falun Gong within the context of its origins as a qigong practice and organization, and David Ownby's Falun Gong and the Future of China (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), a wide-ranging analytical account that looks especially closely at the Falun Gong movement's relations with the state. Penny's book deliberately joins in conversation with these works and is most profitably read in conjunction with them. Penny's special contribution is his sustained consideration of the religious elements of the movement. Most significantly, he provides an analytical biography of Falun Gong founder Li Hongzhi that highlights hagiographical patterns, and he sets forth a clear and detailed account of Falun Gong teachings, including a sharp discussion of how the ethical and cultivation practices of the group fit within its articulated views.
One of the great strengths of this book is the extended discussion of Falun Gong cosmological views and their change and development through time. The movement's millenarian views, which are predicated on stark oppositions between social groups, dire predictions of the future, and a clearly defined base of ethical teachings, link Falun Gong to a well-defined stream of indigenous religious movements through Chinese history, even if some other elements have been borrowed from global New Age religious movements. At the very center of Falun Gong cosmological views sits the master, Li Hongzhi, and his teachings on cultivation techniques. Over time, Li has crafted his persona into that of a kind of mystical superman who plays a crucial role—from nearby or afar—in personally initiating the foundations of each individual practitioner's essential bodily disciplines. Anyone who has thought of this movement simply as an ethical teaching linked to exercises and self-healing practices will be stunned to discover the acutely hierarchical cosmological views that Penny carefully delineates.
As Penny shows, Falun Gong literature and discourse are permeated by Buddhist vocabulary, beginning with the very name of the organization, falun, the Dharma wheel, a central symbol of the Buddhist way. I might add that the visual culture of Falun Gong, especially as seen in early videotapes of the master, is saturated with Buddhistic cues, even while its teachings and practices are in many ways far distant from any reasonably orthodox Buddhist standard. In the multidimensional discourse of Falun Gong, it seems that some Buddhist terms are to be understood in conventionally Buddhistic ways, while in other cases, the standardized translations released by the organization present an idiosyncratic understanding of these terms that simply relies on their conventional familiarity as a kind of legitimizing support.
Penny's research background in Daoist studies provides a reliable basis for his explanations of the Daoist terms that also permeate Falun Gong discourse, especially those associated with the practices of inner alchemy. He addresses Buddhist elements with verve, and opens the door for a more comprehensive analysis that might be taken up by a Buddhist studies specialist. Related to this, one might also seek an analytical account of how the initially confused boundaries between Falun Gong and Buddhism at the time of the 1999 crackdown were negotiated by both the Buddhist establishment and government authorities at national, provincial, and very local levels. This was a matter of considerable concern within Chinese Buddhist communities at the time, and continued to be so well into the first decade of this century. Another question that seems nowhere answered in the voluminous Western-language literature on Li Hongzhi and Falun Gong (at least as far as I have been able to survey it), including Penny's book, is a consideration of the regional origins of Li Hongzhi and his movement. Is there anything particular to the culture of the far northeast, Li Hongzhi's homeland, that might be manifested in the distinctive contours of the teachings and histories of Falun Gong and its leader? One final point of concern is that while Penny carefully and admirably discusses the arbitrary nature of most definitions of “religion,” he never articulates a clear formulation of “religion” as this term applies to Falun Gong, instead using “religion” or “religious” in a generally intuitive manner. While he begins to approach an explicit formulation at the end of the book, it could be articulated with more specificity and precision.
These questions should not diminish Penny's considerable achievement. The Religion of Falun Gong is an admirably accessible work of scholarship that is essential reading for anyone interested in the complexities of modern China and for anyone interested in tracing persistent continuities of Chinese religious phenomena across the long reach of history.
