NEW YORK--Falun Dafa practitioners are celebrating the 21st World Falun Dafa Day, demonstrating the peaceful exercises of Falun Dafa in Lower Manhattan’s Foley Square.
Falun Dafa, also known as Falun Gong, was introduced to the public in China by Li Hongzhi on May 13, 1992.
The practice quickly gained in popularity, and spread around the world, due to its profound effect on practitioners’ health and well-being, according to the Falun Dafa Information Center. Practicing Falun Dafa involves thinking of others first, looking inside, and assimilating to the universal principles of truthfulness, compassion and tolerance.
Partly due to its immense popularity in a short period of time, Falun Dafa has been persecuted by the Chinese communist party for 14 years. Hundreds of thousands of practitioners in China have been tortured, and thousands have been persecuted to death in an effort to force practitioners to give up the practice, according to the Falun Dafa Information Center.
Practitioners both inside, and outside China, continue to appeal to kind-hearted people around the world to learn the facts about the persecution and to stand with practitioners in defending freedom of belief in China.
