Li Hongzhi ()

Born either May 13, 1951 or July 7, 1952). He resides in Brooklyn, New York. He was born in Gongzhuling, Jilin Province, China. Li Hongzhi currently lives in seclusion the United States.

Founder of Falun Dafa

He is the founder of Falun Dafa, lit. "Great Law of the Wheel of Law." His teachings are translated into more than 32 languages and the practice is believed to be present in more than 80 countries as of 2005 ^*" target="_blank" >[http://www.clearwisdom.net/emh/32/.

For the first few years after introducing Falun Gong, Li Hongzhi was granted several awards by Chinese governmental organizations. At the Asian health expo of 1992 and 1993 in Beijing, Falun Gong is successively nominated as the "Star Qigong". At the Oriental Health Expo, Beijing, Li Hongzhi is honoured with "The Award for Advancing Boundary Science" and "Qigong Master most Acclaimed by the Masses". ^*

As practitioners started spreading Falun Gong, Li Hongzhi stipulated that promoting the Falun Gong could never be done for fame and money, practitioners must not accept any fee, donation or gift in return of their voluntary promotion of the practice^*. Falun Gong claims that Li Hongzhi's insistence that the practice be offered free of charge caused a rift with the China Qigong Research Society, the state administrative body under which Falun Dafa was initially introduced, and Li withdrew from the organization. However religious leaders of the Chinese Buddhist Association and Buddhist writers at the time published a number of critiques of Li's Falun Dafa. They pointed out how Li had changed the meanings of many traditional Buddhist terms, stating that because of those changes Falun Dafa could not be considered part of the Buddhist traditon and was heretical to that tradition.

Craig Smith wrote in the New York Times:

• Mr. Li differentiated himself from other qigong masters by wrapping his regimen in a cosmology that promises salvation through the refinement of one's character until the body literally evolves into another form of matter. At that point, the saved person is capable of flying to paradise, which may exist out in the cosmos, or in another dimension. ^*

At a Falun Gong conference in March, 2002 Li talked about his origin with the following statement:“I have neither form nor name, and I am different from anything that composes any being in the cosmos. To the sentient beings in the cosmos, I have nothing. Perhaps when the cosmos is no more, only I am there. I have nothing. No being knows who I am. Yet without me, the cosmos wouldn't exist. The reason I have come here is to save all sentient beings amidst the Fa-rectification at a time when the colossal firmament of the cosmos is disintegrating.” ^*

Awards and Recognition

Mr. Li Hongzhi was nominated for the 2001 Nobel Peace Prize by nearly 600 professors and government officials from 21 countries. Mr. Li was also nominated in 2001 by 28 European Parliament members for the Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought. ^*

Publishers

He is associated with a number of publishers, including Universe Publishing, which prints mainly Falun Dafa-related books and the Epoch Times, a newspaper which Li says "was established by Dafa disciples for validating the Fa.” ^*

Relations with Chinese authorities

On July 30, 1999, Chinese authorities issued a nationwide arrest warrant for Li Hongzhi. A request for arrest warrant was also sent to Interpol, and his passport was revoked, preventing him from traveling internationally. Interpol rejected the warrant, saying that the request violated Article Three of the organization's constitution, which forbids Interpol from intervening in matters of a political, religious, military or racial character.

The arrest warrant followed a July 20 ruling which declared Falun Dafa illegal in China and the incarceration of tens of thousands of practitioners (See: Suppression of Falun Gong). Three months earlier, over 10,000 Falun Dafa practitioners surprised the government by arriving at the National Appeals Office in Beijing to appeal certain cases of arrests and violence against practitioners, and asking for a peaceful resolution to the conflict^*. The office is located just outside Zhongnanhai, the main Chinese government compound, and such an unprecedented number of people gathering there caused great concern among the Communist Party leadership. Afterwards, the CCP claimed that the appeal was organized by Li himself, which he denied. All the practitioners stated that they had acted individually and without anybody's command; at this time there were over 100,000 Falun Gong practitioners in Beijing alone.

In China, Li Hongzhi's name remains blacklisted by the Great Firewall of China, and Falun Gong practitioners held in prisons or Laogai (forced labor camps) are pressured to denounce him as part of their "re-education" process.

Disputes

Li's real birth date is disputed; while he has said that he was born on May 13, 1951, Chinese authorities allege that he was actually born on July 7, 1952, and that he lied about his birth date so that it would be the same as Buddhism's founder Sakyamuni. (These allegations of a deliberate fraud surfaced only after the persecution against Falun Gong was launched in 1999.) Li states that he corrected his birth data, which was confused during the Cultural Revolution, and has not drawn particular significance to it. And in his own words ^*:

TIME: The government has accused you of changing your date of birth to when Sakyamuni Siddhartha Gautama was born.

Li: During the Cultural Revolution, the government misprinted my birthdate. I just corrected it. During the Cultural Revolution, there were lots of misprints on identity. A man could become a woman, and a woman could become a man. It's natural that when people want to smear you, they will dig out whatever they can to destroy you. What's the big deal about having the same birthday as Sakyamuni? Many criminals were also born on that date. I have never said that I am Sakyamuni. I am just a very ordinary man.

According to a Wall Street Journal report "American Dream Finds Chinese Spiritual Leader," on November 1, 1999, Li purchased a house in New York for $293,500 in 1998 shortly after immigrating to the US, then acquired another for $580,000 in New Jersey in 1999. Clearwisdom.net published al letter that it claims is from John Sun, a wealthy New York Falun Gong practitioner who claimed that he bought the house in Li’s wife’s name as an attempt to offer it as a gift, but Mr. and Mrs. Li firmly refused to accept the house.^*

References