Topgun 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.