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CHRISTINE MOON, A senior at Tufts University, spent two weeks of the past month in Geneva, Switzerland, hovering around UN headquarters. To purchase plane tickets, she eagerly cashed out her small getting-started savings account. And like every day before and since, her time overseas was spent passing out fliers, collecting signatures, and dutifully poring over the same non-school-related book. With only one month to go before graduation, she’ll tell you it was all worth the money and time; in fact, she’d like to do it again. That’s because Moon, a slim, pretty, ponytailed 22-year-old, says she’s discovered “the meaning of life.”

That is, she has been welcomed into a warm community and initiated into her first political cause: Falun Gong. What’s more, Moon says she’s upped her hip quotient in the process. “Most of my friends will tell you they think I’m much cooler now,” admits the Long Island native, who’s been practicing the group’s meditative techniques for a little over two years. “People like me better. They say I’ve become more understanding. Maybe I’ve become more mature.”

Falun Gong, also known as Falun Dafa (or “The Practice of the Wheel of Dharma”), is a spiritual practice that melds meditative physical exercises with a mixture of traditional Eastern beliefs. Practitioners perform qi gong (pronounced chee gong), a slow set of movements said to circulate energy, and study a primary text, Zhuan Falun, written by the group’s leader, Li Hongzhi. These days, though, Falun Gong is better known as the beating block of the Chinese government, which banned the nine-year-old group in July 1999. The Communist regime has taken a hard — and, some say, inhumane — line against Falun Gong, and has been accused of imprisoning, beating, and killing people who continue to practice their beliefs in spite of the ban. To date, according to the Falun Dafa Information Center’s Web site (www.faluninfo.net), 197 people have been murdered, around 50,000 have been taken into police custody, and 10,000 have been sent to labor camps. The Chinese government has also been accused of placing Falun Gong practitioners in mental facilities and using mind-control techniques to force them to give up the practice. Last month, the Geneva Initiative of Psychiatry, an international foundation working to end the politicization of psychiatry, publicly condemned the People’s Republic of China for “using psychiatry as a means of repression against its citizens.” And efforts to flee persecution have led to harrowing deaths: in a well-publicized case last January, three Falun Gong practitioners were found dead in a Seattle port, locked in a ship’s cargo crate with dozens of others who survived the perilous overseas journey without light, water, or food.

At first glance, a peaceful-looking assembly of Falun Gong practitioners, breathing deeply, moving slowly, and smiling sweetly, might seem harmless. But even some of those who fault the Chinese government for violating human rights believe that practitioners are participating in a cult — irresponsibly disseminating false information and blindly padding the pockets of an increasingly wealthy leader who holds the copyright to the required text, Zhuan Falun, as well as to the accompanying videos, tapes, and CDs.

Now that it’s the target of persecution, however, the religion has taken on the trappings of a sexy, self-sacrificial cause, especially in cities like Boston that are teeming with young people searching for answers, community, and purpose — people like Christine Moon. “The fact that the government has taken such strong action against [Falun Gong] has, in part, politicized them,” explains Merle Goldman, a professor of Chinese history at Boston University and the author of the forthcoming An Intellectual History of Modern China (Cambridge University Press, 2001). “The reason we’ve paid so much attention is because of how the regime has reacted.” And if China incubated the movement — unintentionally turning what was essentially a quiet spiritual practice into a human-rights crusade — Boston has become a petri dish of Falun Gong culture. On any given day, in all the major universities, in the Arnold Arboretum, on Boston Common, or even in front of Malden City Hall, practitioners of all ages, races, and economic levels can be seen doing the same movements, to the same tape, with similar claims of renewed faith, healing, and long-sought-after answers. If not for China’s crackdown, how many of them would even have heard of Falun Gong?