Reader Finds Connections in Falun Gong Founder’s New Message
Having read “Why The Creator Seeks To Save All Life,” a recent article published by Falun Gong founder Mr. Li Hongzhi, attorney Jeffrey Donner found the ancient Chinese spiritual discipline is not foreign to Western thoughts. Instead, “much of the theology and also the goals and values, as expressed in the article, were well within what I consider to be Western religious thought. And by that, I mean Judaism, Christianity,” said Donner. “I also even see some similarities with Hinduism with that as a multi-deity theology, but the bottom line moral values that it espouses are also very similar.” Falun Gong, also known as Falun Dafa, is a discipline rooted in ancient Chinese traditions that involve moral improvement leading to spiritual enlightenment. The practice is composed of meditative exercises and a set of moral teachings centered on the principles of truthfulness, compassion, and forbearance. Donner, a trial attorney who lives in New Jersey, said he has been following Falun Gong together with his fiancée very regularly since they’re concerned about the persecution of its adherents in China. “I was already interested in the group when I read the article” by Mr. Li, he added. In that essay, Mr. Li writes that the reason Creator seeks to save all human beings is his love for people and that “it is He who bestowed them with life.” “The idea of the love of the Creator, the Supreme Being, for the people, that the Supreme Being creates, is an absolute thread in all of Western religions,” Donner told NTD, a sister media outlet of The Epoch Times. “I’m a practicing Jew,” Donner said, “But I become very familiar with Christianity … because I have friends that are Christians.” “In the Falun Gong article … the Supreme Being is reincarnated into countless, multiple bodies. That concept … is not foreign to Judaism or Christianity,” he said. “Our collective view of the individual is that they do have a portion of God in them” and that “there is a certain godly light in everybody,” he said. “That’s why we treat everybody with the level of respect that we do. “Our system, especially democracy itself, is based on the idea of the individual worth, and the collective individual is what gives power to the government and God gives the rights to the collective individual.” So many ideas in Mr. Li’s article “are very close to our mainstream thinking, even though on first look, they may appear to be disconnected,” he added. Should the public understand these similarities, he said, there will be no basis for “an allowance or acceptability” for the way Falun Gong practitioners are being treated in China. Falun Gong practitioners walk in a parade highlighting the Chinese regime’s persecution of their faith, in Brooklyn, N.Y., on Feb. 26, 2023. (Larry Dye/The Epoch Times) Due to Falun Gong’s immense popularity—an estimated 70 million to 100 million people taking up the practice in the 1990s—the Chinese Communist Party ordered a sweeping campaign to eradicate the faith group, resulting in millions of practitioners being thrown in detention facilities, where they are brainwashed, tortured, or even killed for their organs. In 2019, an independent tribunal in London found that the communist regime has killed prisoners of conscience for their organs to supply the transplant market “on a significant scale” for years, with no evidence that the practice has stopped. The main victims, the tribunal said, are detained Falun Gong practitioners. Donner said the West should take a “much more active stance” to curb the forced organ harvesting abuse, which he described as “unacceptable” “I would hope that individual governments would take an official stance against this kind of conduct in a more aggressive way … bring it into the diplomatic discourse that we have, bring it to the UN, bring it out into the open words discussed in the General Assembly, where it’s discussed in Security Council, where hopefully our media picks up on it and discusses what is really going on and how unacceptable it is.” NTD staff contributed to this report.
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Having read “Why The Creator Seeks To Save All Life,” a recent article published by Falun Gong founder Mr. Li Hongzhi, attorney Jeffrey Donner found the ancient Chinese spiritual discipline is not foreign to Western thoughts.
Instead, “much of the theology and also the goals and values, as expressed in the article, were well within what I consider to be Western religious thought. And by that, I mean Judaism, Christianity,” said Donner. “I also even see some similarities with Hinduism with that as a multi-deity theology, but the bottom line moral values that it espouses are also very similar.”
Falun Gong, also known as Falun Dafa, is a discipline rooted in ancient Chinese traditions that involve moral improvement leading to spiritual enlightenment. The practice is composed of meditative exercises and a set of moral teachings centered on the principles of truthfulness, compassion, and forbearance.
Donner, a trial attorney who lives in New Jersey, said he has been following Falun Gong together with his fiancée very regularly since they’re concerned about the persecution of its adherents in China. “I was already interested in the group when I read the article” by Mr. Li, he added.
In that essay, Mr. Li writes that the reason Creator seeks to save all human beings is his love for people and that “it is He who bestowed them with life.”
“The idea of the love of the Creator, the Supreme Being, for the people, that the Supreme Being creates, is an absolute thread in all of Western religions,” Donner told NTD, a sister media outlet of The Epoch Times.
“I’m a practicing Jew,” Donner said, “But I become very familiar with Christianity … because I have friends that are Christians.”
“In the Falun Gong article … the Supreme Being is reincarnated into countless, multiple bodies. That concept … is not foreign to Judaism or Christianity,” he said.
“Our collective view of the individual is that they do have a portion of God in them” and that “there is a certain godly light in everybody,” he said. “That’s why we treat everybody with the level of respect that we do.
“Our system, especially democracy itself, is based on the idea of the individual worth, and the collective individual is what gives power to the government and God gives the rights to the collective individual.”
So many ideas in Mr. Li’s article “are very close to our mainstream thinking, even though on first look, they may appear to be disconnected,” he added.
Should the public understand these similarities, he said, there will be no basis for “an allowance or acceptability” for the way Falun Gong practitioners are being treated in China.
Due to Falun Gong’s immense popularity—an estimated 70 million to 100 million people taking up the practice in the 1990s—the Chinese Communist Party ordered a sweeping campaign to eradicate the faith group, resulting in millions of practitioners being thrown in detention facilities, where they are brainwashed, tortured, or even killed for their organs.
In 2019, an independent tribunal in London found that the communist regime has killed prisoners of conscience for their organs to supply the transplant market “on a significant scale” for years, with no evidence that the practice has stopped. The main victims, the tribunal said, are detained Falun Gong practitioners.
Donner said the West should take a “much more active stance” to curb the forced organ harvesting abuse, which he described as “unacceptable”
“I would hope that individual governments would take an official stance against this kind of conduct in a more aggressive way … bring it into the diplomatic discourse that we have, bring it to the UN, bring it out into the open words discussed in the General Assembly, where it’s discussed in Security Council, where hopefully our media picks up on it and discusses what is really going on and how unacceptable it is.”
NTD staff contributed to this report.
