I know Falun Gong is a cult

  I know Falun Gong is a cult

Ben Hurley

A guest article from a fellow ex-believer.

Ben Hurley  here: Possibly I owe past readers of my blog an explanation for the long absence of posts. The answer is simply that I have been getting on with my life, and mostly enjoying it. I am, however, still in touch with a number of former Falun Gong believers, and one has asked me to post this beautiful article. It manages to capture so much of the complex feeling that comes with leaving a group like Falun Gong, and more succinctly than anything I have written. I hope you enjoy it.

I know Falun Gong is a cult.

When I began practicing in 2002, I never imagined I would one day say that. Back then, the idea would have felt not only wrong but impossible. Yet here I am, needing to sit down and write this, to tell my story for myself, even if no one ever reads it.

I feel that I have already passed the worst part, the fear. Over time, and with distance, I have found support among others who understand. Former practitioners. People who have left and survived. That has made it possible to finally put words to things I once could not even think.

I clearly remember someone once warning us, back when we were traveling across my home country to speak about the persecution Falun Gong faced in China. They said that one day we would realize it was a cult. At the time, I dismissed it completely. I did not know that it would take years before I began to doubt things myself.

By the time I started questioning, I was already far too deep. My life revolved around what we called clarifying the truth. I still do not believe there is anything wrong with speaking about persecution. Falun Gong practitioners in China have been tortured, imprisoned, threatened and humiliated. Their freedom of belief has been violently suppressed. That is real, and it matters.

But the world is not black and white.

The fact that someone is persecuted does not automatically make them good. This is something I had not been able to hold in my mind at the same time. I believed that suffering alone was proof of moral purity. Over time, I learned how dangerous that belief can be.

Many practitioners continue this work primarily because the movement’s leader, Li Hongzhi, tells them to. His word is treated as absolute truth. Whatever he says about the universe, health, morality or politics is believed and accepted, even when the claims are deeply strange.

From the very beginning, he presented himself as a being above all others, someone capable of saving the entire world.

Shen Yun illustrates this clearly. The show is promoted relentlessly year after year, while remaining essentially the same. At the end of the performance, a godlike figure resembling Li Hongzhi descends and saves humanity from destruction. It is presented as a spiritual truth, packaged as art, at a very high price.

What weighed on me the most was the constant pressure and urgency. Practitioners are told that each of them is responsible for countless sentient beings. They are told they carry infinite responsibility for the fate of the entire universe, and that even the smallest mistake could have catastrophic consequences. This creates an atmosphere where criticism becomes unthinkable.

Who could live with the guilt of failing entire worlds?

An enormous amount of practitioners’ energy is consumed by the need to constantly do more. More projects. More work. More sacrifice. Over time, it became impossible to tell where devotion ended and exhaustion began.

One of the most painful realizations for me was this: The persecution itself might not even continue at this scale if it were not constantly sustained. It is difficult to say, but Li Hongzhi has made the destruction of the Chinese Communist Party a central personal mission. At the same time, he lives safely and comfortably in New York, while followers in China continue to bear the consequences.

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I often ask myself how I ended up practicing Falun Gong in the first place. What made me believe any of it. I have always considered myself a skeptical person, and even now I struggle to understand how I accepted these teachings.

It is equally difficult to comprehend how so many intelligent and thoughtful people I once knew are still practicing, many years after I walked away and said no, this is not true. This is not for me. There were simply too many contradictions I could no longer ignore.

What frightens me most is how deeply practitioners internalize Li Hongzhi’s teachings about health. Followers are taught that illness is caused by their own attachments. If they recover, they thank the master. If they do not, they are told to look inward and accept that their suffering is their own fault, and that the master cannot help them.

Across the world, practitioners refuse medical treatment for entirely treatable conditions because they believe medicine should not be used. Later, Li Hongzhi claimed he never said such things. Yet every true practitioner knows in their heart that he did.

They also know they do not want to be the weak one who resorts to medicine, because doing so would mean admitting they are not a genuine practitioner and that their years of cultivation were wasted. Better to suffer. Better even to die than to heal through what are considered false methods.

I personally know practitioners who died after prolonged and unimaginable suffering because they refused medical care. Afterwards, others implied that these people simply had not looked inward enough, that they still had attachments.

To accept this worldview requires years of relentless self monitoring. Am I worthy of the master? Am I a good practitioner? Have I studied enough? Have I eliminated my attachments? Have I failed unseen beings in other dimensions?

For years, I also gave my labor to the movement. I worked for The Epoch Times for six years. When I began, it was a modest publication focused on human rights. Over time, it grew into a powerful media organization that openly supports right wing politics, idealizes Donald Trump and claims it has no political agenda while clearly advancing one.

Around the same time, Shen Yun and the compound known as Dragon Springs became central to the movement. Over the years, I heard internal accounts about what was happening there that I would never have believed if I had not heard them from multiple sources.

Evidence of abuse and mistreatment of underage performers has since been documented publicly. Still, anyone who speaks out is dismissed as a propagandist or an agent of the Chinese state.

I am not. And neither are many others I know.

After I had already distanced myself and eventually left, I began to notice another shift. The movement expanded its fundraising in more overtly commercial ways. Official Shen Yun affiliated websites began selling symbolic jewelry, clothing and other branded products.

There were also paid subscription-based offerings presented as ways to support the mission. I was no longer involved at that point, but seeing this from the outside raised questions I had never fully allowed myself to ask. Who exactly were these products meant for? Where did the money go? Who benefited?

What once had been framed as selfless cultivation increasingly resembled a closed system, sustained by believers who were already giving their time, labor and loyalty.

Today, life feels astonishingly light. Life tastes the way it is supposed to taste again. Behind me are years of fear, pressure, guilt and constant self surveillance.

I have heard that Li Hongzhi himself lives in ways that directly contradict what he demands of his followers. That realization no longer shocks me.

It simply confirms what I already know.

Falun Gong is a cult.