Slovakia: Introduction of the Book Falun Gong to the Slovak Public

On February 25th, the Book Launch of Falun Gong in Slovak was held in the bookshop Pistek in Bratislava, the capital of Slovakia. After its introduction in China, Falun Gong caused a sensation and, together with other books of the Falun Dafa cultivation practice, became one of the best-selling books in the world’s most populous country.

At the book launch, Falun Gong practitioners demonstrated the exercises of Falun Gong and introduced the persecution of Falun Gong in China in great detail. Upon hearing some of those brutal persecution cases, many people attending the book launch frowned in disapproval and surprise. They couldn’t believe that such a brutal persecution could happen in today’s world. In the discussion that followed, many people inquired about the benefits of practicing Falun Gong and asked many questions about the persecution.

The book launch was attended by two reporters from Slovak radio and a cameraman from the nationwide television station TA3. Practitioners demonstrated the five sets of exercises and introduced Falun Gong to the visitors.

Falun Gong practitioner Peter is one of the translators of the Slovak version of the book Falun Gong. He said: “In the past four years, we used our spare time to translate Falun Gong, Zhuan Falun and Master Li Hongzhi’s articles into Slovak so that Slovakian practitioners and other interested people can read them.” When he was asked about the payment for translating, he said: “Like translators of other languages for Falun Gong materials, we don’t get any payment for doing it. We can thus keep the price of this book relatively low so that more people can afford to buy it.”

It was reported that the publisher of Falun Gong accidentally saw this book two years ago on a Falun Gong website, and then took the initiate to contact local Falun Gong practitioners and discussed the issues around publishing the book in Slovak.

As practitioners were leaving the book-store, one member of the bookstore staff said to the practitioners, “We never had a book launch like this here before! You practitioners cleaned up and returned the tables to their correct places!”

To date Falun Gong books have been published in more than thirty different languages including Chinese, English, German, French, Italian, Spanish, Swedish, Finnish, Russian, Thai, Malaysian, Hebrew, Arabic, Farsi and Romanian.