Top Gun Zen

Barry Kaigen McMahon began his Zen training in California with Taizan Maezumi Roshi, a pioneer teacher of Zen in the West, in the early 1970s. He soon moved to Japan and spent almost five years with Maezumi Roshi s Rinzai teacher, Osaka Koryu Roshi, as the sole foreigner living at the Hannya Dojo, a lay Zen training school in Tokyo. He moved back to the United States in 1978 and entered the US Navy as a fighter pilot, flying F-14s off the deck of the USS Nimitz. The Navy s technical education led to his studies of modern physics, and in 2003 he was invited to the Naval War College to give a talk on Relativity, Quantum Mechanics and Buddhism. He received Dharma Transmission from Charles Tenshin Fletcher Roshi in 2003. He is currently employed as a commercial airline pilot.