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To the Beijing Veteran Practitioners
To the Beijing veteran practitioners:
I would like to share some of my thoughts on your application for registration. We can make our position clear to the General Administration of Sport of China. We should first of all clearly inform them that:
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Our discipline is not a qigong practice for fitness purposes. Rather, it is for spiritual development. However, it is capable of helping our practitioners heal their illnesses and achieve good health.
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The practitioners of our practice are not formally organized, and we have taken a path that is expansive and without any specific format or structure. We do not allow accumulation of any funds or material things [for, or on behalf of, the practice], nor do we offer any positions of authority or designate certain posts. We absolutely forbid practitioners [of Falun Gong] to act on their own and haphazardly register our practice with the governmental administration in their region, which violates our rules, or designate certain positions, create regulations of their own, or get involved with the activities of fitness or fraudulent qigong practices.
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I think you can inform the General Administration of Sport of China that the purpose of my withdrawing from the China Qigong Science Research Society before was because I didn’t wish to be associated with those so-called qigong practices. Those practices aim to defraud people for money; even those that are supposed to be able to help people achieve good health are after money. Some “evaluations” and subsequent “designations” of qigong masters have taken place, but qigong masters can become what they are only after decades of spiritual development, and not by designation through such evaluations. It is irresponsible and harmful to society to perform such designations, and it can spur all kinds of bad intentions—attachments like those are exactly what we work toward eliminating in our practice. For this reason, we absolutely must not engage with people in those practices and go along with them.
It would be best if we could have the Beijing practitioners register [our practice] with the national administration on behalf of all practitioners in China. Practitioners of other regions should not individually register or submit an application with their regional administrative entities. If a single registration with the national administration proves infeasible, then our practitioners should continue to study the Fa and do the exercises of their own initiative, without any organization—they can join the morning exercises of their own initiative—thus preserving our practice’s distinctive features and purity.
Li Hongzhi
December 25, 1998
  
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