Reading Circle 01: Under the Trees-A Journey into Falun Dafa

A chance encounter in London’s Regent’s Park brings together a group of ordinary people who know little about Falun Dafa.

They begin learning the five exercises, reading Zhuan Falun, joining online study discussions, and discovering cultivation experiences shared by practitioners around the world. Some first notice better sleep, more energy and a calmer mood. Others struggle with the pain of meditation and standing exercises, questions about karma, the Celestial Eye and other dimensions, or the challenge of looking inward during real conflicts.

Over several months, work disputes, family relationships, illness and the suffering of ageing and disease begin to change how they see themselves and the world around them.

Under the Trees: A Journey into Falun Dafa is a novel about doubt, experience, compassion and personal transformation—and about what can happen when ordinary people pause long enough to look within.

UNDER THE TREES

A Journey into Falun Dafa

A Novel wrote by Fang Tianliang & AI

Chapter One

Under the Trees

There was nothing unusual about the Sunday morning.

That was what Sarah would remember later.

No strange light over London. No sudden intuition that something important was about to happen. No sense that, before lunch, she would hear the name of a book that would occupy the next several months.

It was simply one of those rare mornings when the city seemed to have forgiven its inhabitants.

The rain had stopped before dawn. By ten, the paths through Regent’s Park were beginning to dry, and the grass carried the deep green London produced so effortlessly after bad weather.

Tom walked beside her with a coffee in one hand and his phone in the other.

“You said no work today.”

“I’m not working.”

“You’re reading an email.”

“I’m deleting an email.”

“That is still work.”

Tom put the phone into his pocket.

“There. Fully present.”

“You lasted eleven minutes.”

“Twelve.”

They had been friends since university.

There had been no single moment when the friendship began. They had simply accumulated coffees, failed relationships, Christmas dinners, train delays and increasingly serious conversations until calling each other anything other than old friends became impossible.

Sarah had suggested the walk.

She had been doing that more often recently—parks, exhibitions, old churches, anywhere that did not involve sitting opposite someone in a restaurant and answering the question:

So, how are things?

Things were fine.

That was the problem.

Her job was fine.

Her flat was fine.

Her health was fine.

Her parents, considering their age, were fine.

Nothing was wrong enough to complain about.

And yet, over the past year, a question had begun appearing at inconvenient moments.

On trains.

In supermarkets.

Once, absurdly, while choosing dishwasher tablets.

Is this really it?

She had never said it aloud.

They had just passed the boating lake when she heard music.

A slow instrumental melody drifted from somewhere beyond the trees.

A group of perhaps twelve people stood on the grass.

Their movements were slow and deliberate.

Some were Chinese. Others were not.

A grey-haired man stood beside a woman in running clothes. A young Black man had closed his eyes. Near the back, an elderly woman copied the movements of the person in front of her.

Nobody appeared to be performing for anyone.

Sarah slowed.

“What are they doing?”

Tom followed her gaze.

“Tai chi?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Qigong?”

She looked at him.

“You know what qigong looks like?”

“I know what Google Images thinks qigong looks like.”

At the edge of the grass stood a blue banner.

Three words were printed beneath a circular emblem.

Truthfulness. Compassion. Forbearance.

Below them:

Falun Dafa

“Have you heard of it?” Sarah asked.

“Falun something rings a bell.”

A woman standing near a folding table noticed them.

She was perhaps in her late fifties, dressed in a navy jacket and trainers, with silver beginning to show through dark hair.

What Sarah noticed first was that the woman did not immediately approach.

No leaflet was pushed into their hands.

Nobody asked them to sign anything.

Sarah walked over.

“Excuse me. What are they doing?”

“The second exercise.”

The woman’s accent was English.

“Is it like tai chi?”

“A little different.”

“What is Falun Dafa?”

The woman smiled.

“That’s a bigger question.”

Tom laughed.

“At least that’s honest.”

“My name’s Jane.”

“Sarah.”

“Tom.”

Jane gestured towards the group.

“Falun Dafa is also called Falun Gong. It’s a cultivation practice from China. There are five exercises, including a sitting meditation, but the exercises are only one part.”

“What’s the other part?” Sarah asked.

“Trying to live according to Truthfulness, Compassion and Forbearance.”

Tom read the banner again.

“So it’s religious?”

Jane paused.

“It doesn’t fit very neatly into the categories people usually use in the West. It’s better if you read about it yourself rather than have me put a label on it.”

Tom’s eyebrows rose.

Sarah knew that expression.

He liked the answer.

Not because he agreed.

Because Jane had declined to sell.

“Can anyone join?” Sarah asked.

“Yes.”

“Do you book?”

“No.”

“Membership?”

“No.”

“How much?”

“Nothing.”

Sarah waited.

Jane said nothing more.

“Nothing today?”

“Nothing.”

“For lessons?”

“There aren’t paid lessons.”

Tom took his hand out of his pocket.

“You teach people for free?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

Jane looked genuinely puzzled.

“Why wouldn’t we?”

Tom glanced at Sarah.

“There is no business model.”

“You sound disappointed.”

“I’m trying to understand.”

Jane pointed to a small card.

“The books and the exercise instruction are available online too. People can learn here or start by themselves.”

“Also free?” Tom asked.

“Yes.”

“Of course.”

The music stopped.

The practitioners relaxed their arms.

Someone laughed about losing count.

A little girl ran towards one of the men shouting, “Daddy!”

The solemnity disappeared.

They looked suddenly like ordinary Londoners in a park.

Sarah felt oddly relieved.

“We’re starting the first exercise again in a few minutes,” Jane said. “You’re welcome to try.”

“I’m wearing jeans.”

“So am I.”

“I’ve never meditated.”

“That doesn’t matter.”

“I’m terribly inflexible.”

“That doesn’t matter either.”

Tom raised his coffee.

“I have a medical condition.”

Sarah turned.

“What medical condition?”

“I’m holding a flat white.”

Jane laughed.

“You can watch.”

“I’m very good at that.”

Sarah hesitated only a few seconds.

Then she stepped onto the grass.

The movements seemed almost embarrassingly simple.

Stretch.

Relax.

Move the hands slowly.

Listen to the music.

Sarah spent the first few minutes wondering whether she looked ridiculous.

Then she realised nobody was watching her.

Jane corrected the angle of her wrist once and moved away.

Across the path, Tom sat on a bench.

His phone was out again.

Sarah almost smiled.

Of course.

What she did not know was that Tom was no longer reading email.

He had typed two words into Google.

Falun Gong

The results appeared immediately.

China.

Meditation.

Persecution.

Human rights.

Cult.

Torture.

Spiritual practice.

Controversy.

Tom frowned.

He looked at the people on the grass.

Then back at the screen.

Within five minutes he had learned enough to know that he understood almost nothing.

That annoyed him.

He opened another result.

Then another.

Some pages described Falun Gong as a traditional Chinese spiritual practice.

Others discussed the Chinese government’s campaign against it.

Another page used language so hostile that he stopped to check who had written it.

Tom stopped scrolling.

Finding information, he knew, was not the same as finding truth.

Search engines did not settle disputes.

They displayed them.

He looked across the grass again.

Nobody had asked who Sarah was.

Nobody had requested money.

Nobody had asked for an email address.

Nobody had tried to discover whether she was lonely, ill, vulnerable, spiritual or politically sympathetic.

She had stepped onto the grass.

They had shown her the movements.

That was all.

It proved nothing.

But it complicated the picture.

Tom disliked complicated pictures.

He also trusted them more than simple ones.

When the exercise ended, Sarah returned to the bench.

“Well?” Tom asked.

“Well what?”

“Enlightened?”

“Almost.”

“How was it?”

She considered.

“Nothing dramatic.”

“No visions?”

“No.”

“Energy currents?”

“No.”

“Levitation?”

“Maybe next Sunday.”

She laughed.

“My shoulders hurt.”

“That I believe.”

Then she stopped.

“But I feel…”

“What?”

“Quiet.”

“You’re in a park.”

“No.”

She touched the centre of her chest.

“Here.”

Tom did not answer.

Sarah noticed his phone.

“What have you been reading?”

“Too much.”

He showed her.

Her expression changed.

“What is all this?”

“Exactly.”

Sarah looked towards Jane.

“Should we ask her?”

Tom stood.

“Yes.”

Then he slipped the phone into his pocket.

“But I want to hear what she says before showing her what I found.”

Sarah smiled.

“You’ve turned a Sunday walk into an investigation.”

Tom looked back at the people on the grass.

“I think the investigation started before I noticed.”

Chapter Two

The Search Results

“Why was Falun Gong suppressed in China?” Tom asked.

Jane was folding the strap of a small speaker into a bag.

“Falun Gong became very popular in China during the 1990s. In July 1999, the Chinese Communist Party began a nationwide campaign against it.”

“Why?”

“There are different accounts of the political reasons. Practitioners generally believe the size and independence of the practice were major factors.”

“How large?”

“Very large.”

“Tens of millions?”

“That was widely reported at the time.”

Tom nodded.

“And the Chinese government says something very different.”

“Yes.”

“You want me to read that too?”

“Yes.”

“And practitioner sites?”

“Yes.”

“Human-rights reports?”

“Yes.”

Jane smiled.

“You’re going to read them anyway.”

Tom looked at Sarah.

“I like her.”

Sarah laughed.

“For now.”

Tom turned back.

“The word ‘cult’ appears very quickly.”

“Yes.”

“So?”

Jane sat on the edge of the bench.

“If I simply tell you the label is false, then you still only have my word.”

“Fair.”

“So ask what concerns you.”

Tom began counting.

“Membership?”

“No.”

“Fees?”

“No.”

“Someone above me telling me where to live?”

“No.”

“Required donations?”

“No.”

“Cutting off family?”

“No.”

“Can I stop coming?”

Jane smiled.

“You haven’t started.”

On the walk towards Baker Street, Sarah carried the introductory card.

Tom continued searching.

“Stop.”

“I’m checking something.”

“You’ve been checking something for forty minutes.”

“This is unusually complicated.”

Sarah looked over his shoulder.

“What’s that?”

“The main book.”

He showed her the title.

Zhuan Falun

“Can we read it?”

“Yes.”

“Online?”

“Yes.”

“Free?”

Tom looked at her.

“Do you see a pattern?”

They found a café.

Sarah ordered tea.

Tom ordered another coffee.

He opened the book on his phone.

They expected something vague.

They did not get it.

The text spoke directly about cultivation, morality, qigong, karma, the human body, dimensions, unusual abilities and questions modern people rarely discussed outside religion or speculative philosophy.

Sarah read the first pages.

Then continued.

Tom watched her.

“What do you think?”

“I don’t know.”

“That is becoming a theme.”

She kept reading.

Something about the tone unsettled her.

The book did not seem embarrassed to ask large questions.

That evening, Sarah intended to read for twenty minutes.

At 11:47 p.m. she realised she was still reading.

Some passages sounded reasonable.

Others seemed completely unfamiliar.

A few she simply did not believe.

Once she closed the browser.

Five minutes later, she opened it again.

At 12:36 her phone lit up.

Tom.

How far did you get?

Sarah stared at it.

Then typed:

You’re reading it too?

The reply came immediately.

For research.

Sarah smiled.

Chapter Three

The Blue Book

Tom stopped reading at 1:18 a.m.

Not because he was tired.

Because he was irritated.

The book was far more specific than he had expected.

Karma.

Other dimensions.

The Third Eye.

Supernormal abilities.

Physical transformation through cultivation.

He closed the laptop.

Then reopened it.

He searched individual concepts.

Criticism.

Practitioner explanations.

Academic commentary.

Forum arguments.

By two in the morning, he had achieved nothing except a headache.

Sarah, meanwhile, had stopped somewhere completely different.

She had reached a discussion of loss, gain and moral character.

It brought back a meeting six months earlier.

A promotion.

A colleague named Emily.

Sarah had wanted the position.

When asked privately whether Emily was ready for greater responsibility, Sarah had said:

“She’s very talented, although she still needs quite a lot of support under pressure.”

It had not been a lie.

That mattered.

She had simply chosen which truths to emphasise.

Three weeks later, Sarah received the promotion.

Now she wondered whether professionalism had simply been the respectable name she gave self-interest.

Her phone buzzed.

Tom.

Still reading?

Then:

I’ve reached the part where modern physics apparently has some catching up to do.

Sarah smiled.

She typed:

I’m stuck somewhere else.

Where?

She looked at the page.

Character.

Tom replied:

Less exciting.

Sarah wrote:

Actually, no.

On Monday morning Jack arrived at Tom’s office carrying two coffees.

“You look terrible.”

“Thank you.”

“Woman?”

“Chinese cultivation practice.”

Jack stopped.

“That’s new.”

Tom turned his monitor.

Zhuan Falun

Jack attempted the title.

“What is it?”

“A book.”

“I had gathered.”

Tom explained Regent’s Park.

The exercises.

The free materials.

China.

The contradictory search results.

Jack leaned closer.

“Falun Gong. I’ve heard of it.”

“Where?”

“No idea.”

He read part of the page.

“Do they mean karma metaphorically?”

“I don’t think so.”

“That gets strange quickly.”

“Yes.”

“So why are you still reading?”

Tom considered.

“Because I don’t understand it.”

Jack laughed.

“That has never stopped you having an opinion before.”

Tom smiled.

“Perhaps that is one of my problems.”

Jack looked at him.

“That book has already damaged you.”

Sarah ordered a physical copy.

Blue cover.

Gold lettering.

She wanted to read away from notifications.

Within twenty pages she had underlined several passages and placed question marks beside others.

Do I actually believe this?

Why does this make sense?

Ask Jane.

Then a longer list:

What exactly is cultivation?

Does being good mean never defending yourself?

What about ambition?

What about love?

What about anger when someone genuinely deserves it?

That last question she underlined twice.

At this stage, she treated the book as she treated every serious book she had ever studied.

Read.

Mark.

Challenge.

Compare.

She had no idea that this habit itself would later become a lesson.

Chapter Four

The First Changes

By their third Sunday in Regent’s Park, Sarah had realised that copying the movements was not the same as knowing how to do them.

Jane gathered the three newcomers before the music began. “Today,” she said, “don’t try to memorise everything. Just understand what each exercise is asking your body to do.”

The first exercise was Buddha Stretching a Thousand Arms. Jane showed them how the movement reached its fullest point. “When you stretch, don’t just reach with your hands. Press down through the heels and lift through the top of the head, as if the whole body is being drawn open from both ends.”

Sarah copied her. The stretch travelled through her shoulders, spine, hips and legs. “Then,” Jane said, “release everything at once. Not gradually.”

Sarah let go. The contrast startled her: a few seconds of complete extension, then sudden ease.

“The exercise instructions describe this stretching and releasing as opening the body’s energy channels,” Jane said. “You don’t need to imagine anything. Just do the movement correctly.”

The second exercise was Falun Standing Stance. Jane raised her arms into the first wheel-holding position. “The arms stay rounded. When they become sore, beginners often let the elbows sink without noticing. Then the shape changes.”

Jack was confident for the first minute. By the third, his shoulders were burning. His elbows began to fall.

Jane corrected him. “Keep the circle. Relax, but don’t collapse it.”

Jack gritted his teeth and lifted his arms again. The ache grew, then seemed to spread through both shoulders. He wanted to stop. Instead he watched the people around him and stayed with the position until the music changed.

When he finally lowered his arms, the soreness faded quickly. What replaced it surprised him: lightness. His shoulders felt loose, almost weightless.

“That was awful,” he said, then rolled his shoulders. “And strangely good afterwards.”

Tom had lowered his arms several minutes earlier.

“Why make yourself suffer?” he asked. “If it hurts, putting your arms down seems like useful information.”

Jane did not argue. “In Falun Dafa, the teachings explain that hardship can transform karma — described as a black substance — into de, a white substance associated with virtue. But you shouldn’t accept that just because I say it. Read the teaching and decide what you understand.”

Tom looked unconvinced. “I understand the sentence. I don’t know that I believe the mechanism.”

“Then don’t pretend you do.”

Beside them, the woman who had held the wheel throughout opened her eyes. Jack, still rubbing his shoulders, said, “My respect for elderly Chinese women has increased significantly.”

The woman looked at him. “I’m Polish.”

Jack froze. She smiled. “Marta.” Tom turned away so nobody would see him laughing.

The third exercise looked easier. The hands travelled slowly up and down in front of the body. Jane moved Jack’s hand closer. “Within about ten centimetres. Palms facing the body.”

“Why that close?” Sarah asked.

“The instructions describe the hands as moving with the qiji — the energy mechanism established for the practice. The simplest way to say it is that the movement follows a mechanism rather than trying to push energy around with your thoughts.”

Sarah moved her palm upward, close to her body without touching it. Warmth? Air? Imagination? She could not tell. For once, she did not stop to decide.

The fourth exercise, Falun Cosmic Orbit, followed the same principle on a larger route. Jane corrected them with only three words: “Slow. Round. Follow.”

Tom tried to reconstruct the path intellectually and kept falling behind. When he finally stopped analysing every movement, it became easier. He noticed that and said nothing.

Then Jane sat on a mat. “The fifth is the sitting meditation.”

Sarah managed to pull one leg into half lotus. The position was immediately painful.

“I can get it up,” she said through clenched teeth. “I’m not sure I can keep it there.”

Jane watched carefully. “There is a difference between the ordinary ache of stretching into a position and injuring yourself. Don’t force an injury. But when it is ordinary discomfort, improvement often comes through persistence.”

Sarah stayed. The pain rose, peaked, and made every minute feel longer than it was. She wanted to put the leg down several times. Each time she waited a little longer.

When the music ended, she released the leg. The pain disappeared far faster than she expected. A soft, spreading ease took its place.

“That is ridiculous,” she said.

“What is?” Jack asked.

“How good it feels when you stop.”

Jane laughed. “Remember that feeling next Sunday.”

Tom sat cross-legged instead. “And the mind?”

“The formal instruction is to become tranquil without deliberately directing thoughts, while your main consciousness remains aware that you are practising.”

“So, empty your mind?”

“I wouldn’t put it that way. Thoughts come. Don’t chase every one of them.”

Jane paused. “When I first started, I found the exercise music helpful. I listened to the music instead of following every stray thought. That is not an official exercise instruction — just something that helped me as a beginner.”

The music began again. Sarah’s leg hurt. Jack’s shoulders still remembered the wheel. Tom lasted only as long as he found reasonable.

They were all doing the same exercises. They were not yet learning the same lesson.

Chapter Five

Cultivation

Over the following month, the three friends kept returning. At first, none of them called it cultivation. They were simply “going to the park.”

Sarah noticed the first change in her sleep. For years she had woken at least once most nights, sometimes twice. She had never considered it serious enough to mention. One morning she opened her eyes and realised it was 6:42. She had slept through the night. The next night, the same. Not every night — but often enough to notice.

She said nothing for a week. Then Tom asked:

“You look annoyingly rested.”

“I’m sleeping better.”

“Since?”

She looked at him. “I know what you’re going to say.”

“I haven’t said anything.”

“You’re going to say correlation isn’t causation.”

Tom paused. “That is true.”

Sarah smiled. “I know.”

Tom’s own change was less dramatic. He had carried tightness in his neck and shoulders for years — office work, laptops, stress. He usually stretched in the afternoon out of habit. Then one Thursday he reached six o’clock and realised he hadn’t thought about his neck all day.

Sarah eventually noticed. “You’re not doing that thing.”

“What thing?”

She imitated him rotating his shoulders. Tom looked offended.

“I do not look like that.”

“You absolutely do.” She paused. “My neck is better,” he admitted.

“Stretching?”

“Possibly.”

“Of course.”

Jack’s first change was mood. He had always been lively, but his energy came in bursts — work all week, drink Friday, sleep badly, spend Saturday tired. By the fourth week he noticed Monday mornings felt less heavy. He was also drinking less, without deciding to. One Friday, when his colleagues ordered another round, Jack looked at the glass in front of him.

“I’m good.”

Oliver stared. “You?”

“Yes.”

“Are you ill?”

“Apparently.” Jack laughed. He did not think of it as cultivation. He simply noticed that he did not want the third drink as much as before.

Margaret joined around the same time. She was in her early sixties and had arthritis in both hands. Her dog had pulled towards the practice site three Sundays in a row; on the fourth, she followed.

“What I really want to know,” she said to Sarah, “is whether this can help these.” She raised her hands.

Jane answered from nearby. “People often report improvements in health, but no one here should promise you a medical result.”

Margaret looked disappointed. “That’s very cautious.”

“It’s also honest.”

Margaret learned the exercises anyway.

Sarah’s progress was easiest to see in the fifth exercise. On the first Sunday she could barely keep one leg in half lotus. By the second week she could hold it longer. By the end of the month, after practising at home as well as in the park, she managed full lotus for the first time.

It hurt. Both knees protested, and for several minutes she could think of almost nothing else. But she stayed with it. When she finally released her legs, the pain vanished into the same extraordinary lightness she had noticed on the first day — only stronger.

She began to understand why practitioners did not judge every difficult moment by how it felt while they were inside it.

Jack noticed something similar with the standing exercise. He still disliked the long wheel-holding positions, but after several weeks he could keep the shape without letting his arms sink. The soreness no longer frightened him because he knew how relaxed he would feel afterwards.

Tom remained different. When discomfort crossed the line he had privately decided was reasonable, he stopped. The teaching about karma transforming into de still made no sense to him. To suffer because suffering might have value seemed, to Tom, like accepting a conclusion before the evidence.

By the fifth week, Sarah had finished the first several lectures.

“What exactly does cultivation mean?” she asked one Sunday.

Jane looked at her. “The Chinese term is xiulian.” She pronounced it slowly. “Xiu is about cultivating or improving yourself — your character, your heart, the way you deal with others. Lian refers to practice and refinement, including the exercises.”

“So exercise is only one half.”

“In a simple way of putting it, yes.”

Jack looked towards the group. “That explains why moving your arms isn’t enough.”

Marta joined them. “I thought exercise was the important part when I started.”

“What changed?” Sarah asked.

“I felt much better physically quite quickly. That made me keep going.” Sarah nodded — that made sense. Marta continued: “But later I realised feeling better was only the door.”

“To what?”

Marta thought. “To seeing myself.”

Tom looked sceptical. “That sounds abstract.”

“It was abstract to me too.” She smiled. “Until somebody made me angry.”

That week Sarah’s colleague Emily came to her office.

“There’s going to be another restructuring.”

Sarah already knew.

“I’m thinking of applying for the new strategy role.”

So was Sarah.

“Do you think I should?”

Sarah felt the familiar instinct rise — protect your position, be supportive but not too supportive. Then she remembered what Marta had said. Until somebody made me angry. Perhaps conflict was not the only test. Interest was too.

“You should apply.”

Emily looked surprised. “You don’t think it’s too early?”

“No. You’ll need a stronger financial section, though — that’s where they’ll push.”

Emily leaned forward. “Would you look at mine?”

There it was. Sarah almost laughed. “Send it.”

After Emily left, Sarah sat very still. She did not feel noble. She felt irritated.

That evening she messaged Tom. I think cultivation is inconvenient.

Tom replied: I was hoping it might remain theoretical.

Chapter Six

Minghui

One evening, after an online reading session, Marta asked whether anyone read Minghui.

“What’s Minghui?” Tom said.

“A website practitioners read — people from many countries write about their own cultivation experience. What happened when they started, conflicts they’ve had, things they’ve come to understand, mistakes, sometimes things they’ve seen.”

“Seen?” Jack leaned towards the screen.

“Sometimes.”

Tom looked interested despite himself. “Subjective accounts, though.”

Marta smiled. “Everything human beings report is subjective at the point of reporting it.”

Tom paused. “Fair.”

Sarah opened it that night, expecting doctrine. She found people instead — older women, engineers, teachers, farmers, parents, students, practitioners from a dozen countries. Some had begun because of illness. Some because someone had handed them a book years ago and they’d only just picked it up. Some had stopped and come back much later.

Most of the stories were ordinary — a quarrel with a husband, giving up a resentment, breaking the habit of blaming someone else. A few were not. A woman described the sitting meditation, her legs aching, and something she called dark matter leaving her body. Another described light around the book she was reading.

Sarah did not know what to make of the second kind. But she kept reading the first.

Margaret called one evening. “I felt something rotating in my lower abdomen. During the second exercise.”

“Rotating?”

“Yes.”

“Did it hurt?”

“No.”

“Then what?”

Margaret laughed. “That’s it.”

Sarah smiled. “You sound disappointed.”

“I thought something supernatural should at least last longer.”

Tom read differently. He searched for Western practitioners, then people with scientific backgrounds, then accounts involving the Third Eye. He remained unconvinced — but after a few weeks he stopped using the word nonsense.

Sarah noticed. “You haven’t mocked any of these for at least ten minutes.”

“They’re still personal accounts. They don’t prove the interpretation.”

“No.”

“But they’re records of what people say happened to them.”

“That sounds different.”

Tom thought about it. “It is.”

Chapter Seven

What the Eye Cannot See

Tom’s difficulty with the Third Eye remained.

He could accept that science did not know everything. He could accept that human senses were limited. What he could not easily accept was that another form of vision might exist.

“When you say people see other dimensions,” he asked Marta one Sunday, “what exactly do you mean?”

Marta looked towards Jane, who was helping a newcomer with the exercises.

“Read Lecture Two carefully.”

“I have.”

“Again.”

Tom smiled. “I knew someone would say that.”

Marta did not smile back. “I mean it.”

He reread the section on the Celestial Eye and found it genuinely unsettling — the idea that ordinary human eyes did not perceive the whole of reality.

Sarah found it less threatening. “What if ordinary vision is just one instrument?”

“We know ordinary vision is limited,” Tom said.

“Exactly.”

“That doesn’t prove another kind of eye exists.”

“I didn’t say it did.”

Tom stopped. He was beginning to notice how often Sarah no longer argued with him. It made his own arguments feel louder than he meant them to.

A few mornings later, Sarah was reading at the kitchen table, sunlight coming through the window at an angle. She looked down. For several seconds the page seemed unusually bright — not white, gold. The impression was strong enough that she moved the book to check. The light stayed. Then it was gone.

She checked the window, the angle of the sun, a reflection from the building opposite. Nothing obvious explained it. She did not call anyone, or announce anything. She closed the book, opened it again — ordinary page, ordinary paper.

That evening she mentioned it to Marta, who listened without excitement.

“Maybe you saw something.”

“Maybe it was light.”

“Maybe.”

“That’s all?”

Marta smiled. “What else do you want me to say? Keep reading.”

Chapter Eight

The Questions No One Asked

Sarah had been asking the same question for twenty years. She had simply changed its vocabulary. At eighteen: what is the meaning of life? At twenty-five: what career will actually fulfil me? At thirty-two: why am I still not satisfied when things are going well? At thirty-eight: what happens when my parents die?

Years earlier she had written in a notebook: If a person disappears, why does love feel as though it has nowhere to go? Below it: Are we only chemistry experiencing itself?

Twenty-three-year-old Sarah had been dramatic. But the question survived her. She had tried philosophy, psychology, Buddhist books, a church in Islington, podcasts about consciousness and near-death experiences, meditation apps. None of it had been entirely useless — but she often felt like she was hearing people describe different walls of the same dark room, none of them willing to say what the room itself was.

What startled her about Zhuan Falun was not that she immediately believed its answers. She didn’t. It was that the book was actually willing to answer — why people suffered, why morality mattered, what cultivation was for, whether life extended beyond a single lifetime, whether visible matter was the limit of what existed.

One night she messaged Tom. I think I know why I’m still reading.

Better sleep?

No.

The glamorous social life?

Definitely not.

A pause. Then:

It answers questions I thought adults were supposed to stop asking.

Tom read it twice.

Maybe adults just get better at avoiding them.

Sarah stared at that. For once, Tom was not joking.

Chapter Nine

The Marks in the Book

Sarah reached Lecture Nine on a Saturday morning, reading at the kitchen table, pencil beside her. The earlier pages carried her history — underlines, question marks, arrows, notes. Why? Evidence? Compare Buddhism. Ask Jane.

Then she reached a passage about not casually marking or damaging the book. She stopped, read it again, and looked back through the pages she had already covered in pencil.

She had never thought anything of it before — she treated every serious book this way, university textbooks, philosophy, work reports. If something mattered, she marked it.

But the pages looked different now. Not ruined. Simply careless. She realised that somewhere along the way, Zhuan Falun had stopped being merely a subject she was analysing from outside. It had become the book guiding her cultivation. That was not the same relationship.

The next morning she bought a plain notebook. From then on, the questions went there.

Tom noticed a week later. “No more coloured tabs?”

“Separate notebook.”

“Why?”

Sarah looked at the blue book. “I think I was treating it too much like something I was studying, rather than something I was practising.”

Tom was quiet. He understood more than she expected.

Chapter Ten

David

David came with a friend from the reading group on a cool Sunday in early autumn. Forty-seven, Midlands accent, a churchgoing childhood he’d never quite shaken. He’d read the first lecture.

“I don’t see what’s new about telling people to be good,” he said. “Truthfulness, Compassion, Forbearance — Christianity teaches truth, love, forgiveness.”

“That comparison is understandable,” Tom said.

David spent his first weeks doing more of it. Compassion became Christian love. Karma became sin. Forbearance became forgiveness. Meditation became prayer. He didn’t notice he was doing it.

Then one evening, mid-paragraph in the reading group, he stopped. “Sorry. I think I’ve realised something.” Everyone looked up. “I’m not really reading this book. I’m forcing every new idea back into categories I already know. If it sounds Christian, I accept it. If it doesn’t, I call it strange.” He closed the book halfway. “Which means I’m not learning something new — I’m only rearranging what I already believed.”

No one answered him. They simply kept reading. For David, that was more useful than another comparison would have been.

From then on, when an old, familiar phrase rose automatically in his mind, he noticed it — and let it go, without panic, without mixing the two teachings together. He simply returned to the text in front of him. Over time the habit weakened. His childhood hadn’t vanished from memory. It just stopped being the frame every new idea had to pass through.

Chapter Eleven

Margaret’s Hands

A spell of colder weather made Margaret’s arthritis worse. For two Sundays she didn’t come. Sarah visited her in St John’s Wood.

“I thought perhaps this would help more quickly,” Margaret admitted.

“Your hands?”

“Some days.” She shrugged. “But that’s no longer the interesting part.”

“What is?”

“My daughter.” Sarah laughed before Margaret even finished. “She’s been able to make me angry since 1989.”

“What does she do?”

“Exists incorrectly.” Sarah laughed harder. “She doesn’t call enough. Then when she calls, she tells me what I should do.”

“Is she bossy?”

“Yes.”

Margaret paused. “So am I.”

That was new. She described an argument the previous week — the same argument, in essence, they’d had for thirty years, Margaret describing her daughter as impatient. But halfway through this one, she’d heard her own tone. “I suddenly realised where she learned it.”

Sarah smiled. Margaret lifted her hands. “I came because these hurt.” Then touched her chest. “Apparently something else needed looking at too.”

Her hands did begin to improve over the following weeks — not overnight, not perfectly. She still saw her GP, still took her prescribed medication. But the morning stiffness eased, and her sleep improved. Her daughter noticed something else first.

“You sound happier.”

“I’m retired.”

“You were retired before.”

“Fair.”

“You also argue less.”

“That is slander.”

Her daughter laughed, then said, “No, Mum. Really.” Margaret put the phone down afterwards and sat quietly. That comment meant more to her than a good morning with her hands.

Chapter Twelve

Not Now

By the third month, Jack’s attendance had become irregular.

He did not decide to stop. That was how he explained it to himself. Work became busier. Chloe wanted weekends away. His father had begun having tests at hospital. One reading became three missed readings, then several Sundays passed without the park at all.

Everything okay? Sarah messaged.

Yep. Crazy busy. Next week.

He meant it.

Nothing dramatic happened. He did not reject Falun Dafa. He did not decide Zhuan Falun was wrong. The blue book simply moved from the coffee table to a shelf because Chloe wanted room for flowers.

A supermarket receipt still marked the page.

Then his mother called. Jack’s father had been admitted to hospital after his condition suddenly worsened.

Jack went that evening. The ward smelled of disinfectant and overheated air. His father, who had always seemed permanently older rather than actually old, looked smaller in the bed.

They talked about ordinary things because neither of them knew how to talk about fear.

On the way home, Jack watched strangers moving through the station — a child asleep against his mother, an elderly man gripping the handrail, a nurse in uniform eating crisps from a packet. Birth. Ageing. Illness. Death. The sequence was so ordinary that most days nobody looked directly at it.

For the first time, Jack understood why those questions in Zhuan Falun had felt uncomfortable. They were not philosophical decorations. They were waiting inside everyone’s life.

He still did not return to the park the next Sunday.

He told himself he was tired.

Chapter Thirteen

Looking Within

The phrase looking within had irritated Tom at first. It sounded too simple. Possibly unhealthy.

“What if the other person really is wrong?” he’d once asked.

“Then they may be wrong,” Marta had said.

“That’s it?”

“You still look at yourself. Because their fault doesn’t explain my attachment.”

Tom remembered that several weeks later. Richard took Tom’s work — there was no softer way to describe it. Six months of analysis, modelling, recommendations, presented to the board as Richard’s own. Tom sat three chairs away watching senior management praise it. The anger was immediate. This wasn’t philosophical. There was salary involved, a promotion, a reputation.

Afterwards he prepared exactly what he intended to say. He had the documentation — email histories, file dates, version control, enough to make Richard look very bad.

He walked to Richard’s office and stopped outside. He separated the thoughts. He wanted the attribution corrected — reasonable. He wanted his contribution recognised — reasonable. He wanted Richard stopped from doing it again — reasonable. And he wanted Richard humiliated. That one was different, and, he realised, the strongest of the four.

For the first time, looking within didn’t sound abstract. It sounded painfully specific.

He went in anyway.

“The analysis you presented was mine.”

Richard leaned back. “We developed it as a team.”

“No.” Tom’s voice stayed level. “I can document every stage.”

“Are you accusing me?”

“Yes. But I’m not here to insult you. I want the record corrected.”

He didn’t back down. Didn’t pretend nothing had happened. Didn’t walk away. He pursued it formally.

Two days later, the board’s record was corrected. Richard avoided him for a week.

“So you won,” Sarah said, at the park.

“I got the correction.”

“Same thing.”

“No.”

“What’s the difference?”

Tom looked out towards the trees. “I didn’t need him to suffer.”

Sarah said nothing. Four months earlier, Tom would have been proud of that sentence. Now he was simply glad he’d noticed the difference.

Chapter Fourteen

What Other People Saw

Emily noticed Sarah first.

“You’re different.”

“That sounds ominous.”

“No. You don’t defend yourself as quickly.”

“I still do.”

“Less. You also help more.”

“I helped before.”

“Yes — but before, you sometimes made sure people knew.”

Sarah stared at her. Emily laughed. “Sorry.”

“No. You’re right.”

That surprised them both.

At work, Tom had once been known for saying, quite accurately and without malice, “That isn’t my responsibility.” Then one Friday a colleague fell ill before a deadline, and his manager looked around the room. Tom knew what everyone was thinking. Not mine. He thought it too. Then he heard himself say, “I can finish it.”

“You’re already overloaded,” his manager said.

“I know.”

He stayed late. Not heroically, not happily — he was tired. But he didn’t spend the evening resenting anyone for it. That was new.

Jack, during the stretches when he practised consistently, noticed something similar in himself — arriving earlier, complaining less, no longer picking only the parts of a project he liked. “You’re strangely easy to work with these days,” Oliver said once. Jack stared at him. “That is possibly the worst insult I’ve ever received.” Oliver laughed. So did Jack — and later, alone, he understood exactly what the comment meant.

Tom read, with his usual scepticism, about health surveys practitioners in China had reported before 1999, describing very high rates of self-perceived improvement. He refused to treat them as clinical evidence, and said so.

“Do you always have to qualify everything?” Margaret asked.

“Less than I used to.” That made everyone laugh. Then he added, “But if huge numbers of ordinary people believed their health was improving, that’s probably part of why it spread so quickly.”

“To be clear,” Sarah said, “that’s still their account of their own health. Not a diagnosis.”

“Yes,” said Tom. “I know the difference now. That’s new too.”

Chapter Fifteen

The Book on the Shelf

Jack’s father stabilised after several difficult days in hospital. The doctors were cautiously optimistic, but Jack left each visit with the same unsettled feeling: relief mixed with the knowledge that nothing human stayed fixed forever.

Three days later Jack developed influenza-like symptoms himself — fever, aching muscles, a pounding head and the exhausted feeling that even walking from the sofa to the kitchen required planning.

He did what he normally did when ill: rested, drank fluids and followed ordinary medical advice. But being alone in the flat, stripped of work and distraction, also left him with too much time to think.

From the sofa he noticed the blue spine on the shelf.

He pulled down Zhuan Falun. The supermarket receipt was still inside — milk, coffee, pasta, toothpaste, a record of an ordinary evening when he had assumed there would always be another week.

He read a little, slept, woke and read again.

Later he opened Minghui. One search led to accounts written during the COVID-19 pandemic. Some people described being seriously ill and repeatedly reciting two phrases they regarded as sincere expressions of support for Dafa: “Falun Dafa is good” and “Truthfulness, Compassion, Forbearance is good.” Some of those writers attributed unexpected recoveries to that experience.

Jack knew what Tom would say before Tom said it: personal testimony was not clinical evidence, and a story on a website was not a substitute for medical care.

He knew that too.

But lying there feverish, he was struck by something other than proof. These people had turned towards the practice at moments when fear and pain had stripped away their usual certainties. Jack, by contrast, had found something meaningful and then postponed it because life was busy.

He closed the laptop.

For a while he repeated quietly, almost experimentally: “Falun Dafa is good.”

He did not expect a miracle. He did not use the words as medicine. But saying them brought back the park, the music, Jane’s patient corrections, Sarah struggling to keep her leg in lotus, and the strange calm he had once felt after holding the wheel until his arms shook.

When the fever had passed and he was well enough to go out again, he opened the old reading-group chat.

What time Sunday?

Sarah replied almost immediately: 10.

Then: Is your dad okay?

Stable. I’ll tell you Sunday.

A moment later Jack added:

I’m coming back.

Chapter Sixteen

Under the Trees

By early autumn, Regent’s Park had begun to change.

The mornings were cooler now. The light fell at a lower angle through the branches, turning the edges of the leaves gold. Summer had not quite gone, but it was preparing to leave.

It had been only a little over four months since Sarah and Tom had stopped beside the blue banner for the first time.

To Sarah, it felt both shorter and much longer.

Jane was already setting up the music when she arrived.

Marta stood nearby talking with Margaret. David had come down from the Midlands again. Tom appeared a few minutes later, coffee in hand as usual.

Then Sarah saw Jack.

He was walking towards them more slowly than before.

“You came,” she said.

Jack smiled.

“I said I would.”

“That has not always meant very much.”

“Fair.”

She hugged him.

“How’s your dad?”

“Stable.”

Jack looked relieved simply saying the word.

“He’s still in hospital, but the doctors think he’s through the worst of it.”

“And you?”

He gave a small laugh.

“Also alive.”

The flu had left him thinner and more tired than Sarah remembered.

“Still weak?”

“A bit.”

Then he looked across the grass.

“But better.”

Tom joined them.

“You look terrible.”

Jack stared at him.

“Thank you. I missed you too.”

For a moment everything felt familiar again.

The music began.

They stood in a loose line beneath the trees.

Jack’s arms started to ache during the second exercise much sooner than they once had.

Three months earlier, on the first day he learned the wheel-holding positions, he had thought his shoulders were on fire.

He had wanted to drop his arms.

Instead he had looked at the older practitioners beside him, seen that they were still standing quietly, and somehow remained there until the music changed.

When he finally lowered his arms, the soreness disappeared surprisingly quickly.

In its place had come a strange lightness.

He remembered thinking:

So that was what was on the other side of it.

Tom had reacted differently.

The first time his arms became painful, he had simply lowered them.

Jane had told him to try to maintain the position.

Tom had asked why.

She had explained that Falun Dafa taught that suffering in cultivation could eliminate karma, and that black karmic matter could be transformed into white matter called virtue.

Tom had listened.

Then said:

“I don’t believe that.”

Jane had nodded.

“Then don’t pretend you do.”

That answer had stayed with him.

He still did not fully understand the teaching.

But over the months, he had become less certain that disbelief was the same thing as disproof.

Today, when his arms began to ache, he kept them up a little longer than usual.

Jack noticed.

He said nothing.

Sarah’s progress in the sitting meditation had surprised even herself.

On her first attempt at half lotus, she had barely managed to lift one leg into position.

Within minutes the pain had become sharp.

Her instinct had been immediate:

Put it down.

Instead she clenched her teeth and stayed.

The pain seemed to rise, peak, and spread.

Then, when she finally lowered her leg, the whole body felt strangely loose and comfortable.

A month later, she managed full lotus for the first time.

Both legs crossed.

It hurt even more.

But now she knew the pain changed.

It came in waves.

And when she endured it for a while and finally released the posture, there was again that remarkable feeling of lightness.

Not triumph.

Not achievement.

Relief.

And something quieter beneath it.

She had begun to realise how quickly she normally obeyed discomfort.

A difficult colleague.

An inconvenient task.

An embarrassing mistake.

A painful leg.

Her first reaction had always been the same:

Make this stop.

Cultivation was teaching her, slowly, that not every unpleasant thing had to be escaped immediately.

When the exercises ended, they remained beneath the trees.

No one was in a hurry to leave.

Jack sat on a bench.

Margaret handed him a flask.

“Tea.”

“You’ve become very British.”

“I was born in Surrey.”

“I keep forgetting.”

“That’s because you never listen.”

Jack smiled.

Across from them, Tom was looking at his phone.

Sarah noticed the expression on his face.

“What?”

Tom turned the screen towards her.

Another article about Falun Gong.

The headline repeated some of the same accusations he had seen on his first Sunday in the park.

Sarah read a few lines.

“You’ve gone quiet.”

Tom put the phone down.

Four months earlier, he would already have opened five more tabs.

He would have compared sources, searched dates, checked terminology, and prepared several arguments before anyone else finished reading the headline.

This time he simply looked towards the people around him.

Jane packing away the speaker.

Marta helping a newcomer with an exercise movement.

Margaret pouring tea.

David carrying a box of books.

Jack, still pale from illness, sitting under a tree.

Tom shook his head.

“I don’t know everything about what happened in China.”

Nobody interrupted.

“But I’m fairly sure this description isn’t true of the people I’ve spent the last four months with.”

Sarah looked at him.

“Fairly sure?”

Tom smiled.

“I’m improving.”

Jack laughed.

Tom picked up the phone again, glanced at the headline, then locked the screen.

“At least,” he said, “it isn’t true of what I’ve experienced.”

That was all.

For Tom, it was enough.

They sat together for a while.

It was not a formal discussion.

No one had planned it.

Perhaps because Jack had returned, or because the season was changing, Sarah suddenly asked:

“If you had to describe the last few months in one sentence, what would you say?”

Margaret answered first.

“My hands are better.”

She held them up.

“But that isn’t the best part.”

“What is?” Jack asked.

“My daughter likes me more.”

Everyone laughed.

“I’m serious.”

Margaret smiled.

“We still disagree. But I don’t need to win every conversation anymore.”

She paused.

“And I’m happier.”

David nodded.

“For me, it’s learning not to turn everything new into something old.”

Tom looked at him.

“Still thinking in Christian language?”

“Sometimes.”

David smiled.

“But now I notice it. I don’t need to force Falun Dafa into the framework I grew up with.”

Sarah turned to Jack.

“Your turn.”

Jack looked towards the grass.

“My father getting ill changed something.”

His voice became quieter.

“Sitting in that hospital, watching people who were old, sick, frightened... I kept thinking how ordinary it all was.”

No one spoke.

“Birth. Ageing. Illness. Death.”

He looked down at his hands.

“You know those things exist. Of course you do. But knowing the words isn’t the same as sitting beside someone you love and realising you can’t protect them from any of it.”

Then he smiled faintly.

“And then I went home and got the flu.”

Margaret laughed softly.

“Excellent timing.”

“Perfect.”

Jack continued.

“I felt awful. Fever, aches, no energy. And while I was lying there I read some Minghui stories from the pandemic.”

Sarah knew which ones he meant.

Accounts from people who said that during COVID they had sincerely repeated:

Falun Dafa is good.Truthfulness, Compassion, Forbearance is good.

Some described recoveries they regarded as extraordinary.

Jack had not thrown away his medicine.

He had not ignored medical advice.

And he knew that personal testimonies were not clinical evidence.

But something about those accounts had stayed with him.

“So I tried it,” he said.

Tom looked at him.

“The words?”

“Yes.”

“What happened?”

Jack thought.

“I got better.”

Tom waited.

Jack smiled.

“Before you say anything, I know. Flu gets better. People recover.”

Tom said nothing.

“That’s not actually the point,” Jack continued. “The point is that when I was sick, and frightened about Dad, those words gave me something I hadn’t had for a while.”

“What?” Sarah asked.

Jack looked towards the practitioners.

“Trust.”

Sarah was next.

“I sleep better.”

Margaret nodded approvingly.

“I’m less anxious.”

Sarah looked at the blue book beside her.

“And I think I’ve stopped treating every problem as evidence that somebody else needs to change.”

Tom raised an eyebrow.

“Stopped?”

Sarah laughed.

“Started stopping.”

“That I believe.”

She smiled.

“Four months ago, if something went wrong, my first question was usually: what did they do?”

“And now?”

“Sometimes—not always—I ask what I did.”

She paused.

“That sounds small when I say it.”

Jane, who had joined them quietly, shook her head.

“It isn’t.”

They looked at Tom.

“No.”

Jack grinned.

“You haven’t even heard the question.”

“I know the question.”

“Then answer it.”

Tom leaned back.

He looked towards the same stretch of grass where Sarah had first learned the movements.

Four months.

He had not seen another dimension.

He had not seen a Celestial Eye.

He had not seen black karma become white virtue.

He had not seen the golden light Sarah once described.

Some ideas in Zhuan Falun still seemed extraordinary to him.

Some he simply did not understand.

But his shoulders rarely bothered him now.

He was calmer at work.

He had caught himself helping colleagues without first calculating whether the task belonged to him.

He argued less.

Or, more accurately, he still argued—but increasingly without needing the other person to lose.

And somewhere along the way, a sentence had become less comfortable:

If I cannot explain it, it must be wrong.

Tom looked at Jack.

“I know less than I thought I knew.”

Jack waited.

“That’s it?”

“That’s quite a lot.”

Sarah smiled.

It was.

Jack looked around the circle.

“Actually, mine is shorter.”

Margaret groaned.

“After that speech?”

“Yes.”

He pointed towards the blue banner in the distance.

“If I had to describe these months in the fewest words possible…”

He paused.

Then said:

“Falun Dafa is good.”

Margaret smiled immediately.

“Yes.”

David nodded.

“It is.”

Sarah looked towards the trees.

Then at Jane.

Then at the book beside her.

“Yes,” she said.

“Falun Dafa is good.”

For a moment nobody spoke.

Then Jack looked at Tom.

Tom sighed.

“Here we go.”

“You’re the last one.”

“I noticed.”

“Well?”

Tom looked at them.

Then across the grass.

“I still don’t know what I think about everything in the book.”

Jack smiled.

“Of course you don’t.”

Tom ignored him.

“But I know this much. What I’ve experienced here is not what those reports say it is.”

He paused.

“And whatever else I still don’t understand, these four months have made me calmer, healthier, and less certain that I already know the answer.”

Jack raised an eyebrow.

“That’s your version of ‘Falun Dafa is good’?”

Tom smiled.

“You can translate it that way if you like.”

They laughed.

A young couple had stopped nearby.

The woman was watching the practitioners.

Then she walked towards Sarah.

“Excuse me.”

Sarah stood.

“What are you doing?”

For a moment Sarah saw herself four months earlier.

A Sunday morning.

A walk through Regent’s Park.

Tom holding coffee.

Jane beneath the trees.

A question she had not known would matter.

“What is Falun Dafa?” the woman asked.

Sarah smiled.

“That’s a bigger question.”

The woman laughed.

Her partner looked towards the group.

“Can anyone learn?”

“Yes.”

“Do we have to join something?”

“No.”

“Does it cost anything?”

“No.”

He looked surprised.

“Nothing?”

“Nothing.”

“Why?”

Sarah remembered Jane’s answer from that first morning.

Why wouldn’t we?

She almost repeated it.

Then she stopped.

Some answers had to become your own.

“Because it was given to us for free too.”

The woman looked towards the grass.

“Can we try?”

“Of course.”

Sarah showed them where to stand.

Behind her, Jack and Tom were still arguing quietly.

Margaret was laughing.

David helped Jane with the books.

Marta corrected the newcomer’s hands.

The music began again.

London continued around them.

People walked past.

Some never looked.

Some slowed down.

One man stopped for a moment, read the words on the banner, then walked on.

Perhaps he would return next Sunday.

Perhaps months later.

Perhaps never.

Sarah no longer felt responsible for that.

A door could be opened.

No one could be pushed through it.

She raised her arms.

Sunlight moved between the branches.

Four months earlier, she had come to the park looking for nothing in particular.

Now she stood beneath the same trees.

The park had not changed.

But she had.

Epilogue

If You Would Like to Learn More

This novel is fiction, but many of the questions, hesitations and experiences reflected in it are inspired by accounts shared by Falun Dafa practitioners in Britain and elsewhere.

If you want to learn more, please don’t rely on the characters in this novel — or on any single practitioner — as your only source.

Read the teachings for yourself. The principal text of Falun Dafa is Zhuan Falun. Official English translations, exercise instructions and exercise music are available online, free of charge.

Falun Dafa combines five sets of exercises with the cultivation of character according to Truthfulness, Compassion and Forbearance. Local practice sites in many countries offer instruction voluntarily and without fees.

Some practitioners also read Minghui.org, where practitioners around the world share first-person cultivation experiences involving health, family life, work, character, spiritual understanding and, in some cases, phenomena they interpret through the teachings of Falun Dafa.

The novel’s references to people reciting “Falun Dafa is good” during illness reflect personal testimonies reported by practitioners. Such accounts are not clinical evidence, do not establish that recitation treats or cures disease, and should not be used as a substitute for medical diagnosis or treatment.

Likewise, individual reports of improved health after beginning the practice are personal experiences, not guarantees of medical outcomes. Decisions about medication or medical care should be made responsibly with appropriately qualified healthcare professionals.

You don’t need to accept every idea before you begin reading.

You don’t need to join an organisation.

You don’t need to pay a membership fee.

You can read. You can learn the exercises. You can ask questions.

And you can decide for yourself.