About Us   Teachers Events Programme Contacts Links LV | RU	Zen Master Seung Sahn (Dae Soen Sa Nim) is the founding teacher of the Kwan Um School of Zen, and is the seventy-eighth Patriarch in his line of Transmission. He received transmission from the famous Korean Zen Master Ko Bong, and later came to the United States, becoming the first Korean Zen Master to live and teach in the West. Zen Master Wu Bong is the head teacher of The Kwan Um School of Zen, Europe.  He became the first zen student of Zen Master Seung Sahn in America in 1972 and received transmission of the Dharma from his teacher in 1993.    Hyon Gak Sunim Venerable Hyon Gak Sunim was born Paul J. Muenzen in 1964 to a family of devout  Catholics in New Jersey, U.S.A. His mother has a PhD in biochemistry, and his father was an executive at a prominent American computer company.        Educated in literature and philosophy at Yale University (Class of 1987) and comparative  religions at Harvard Divinity School (’92), Ven. Hyon Gak Sunim was ordained in 1992 in  the temple of the Sixth Patriarch, Nam Hwa Sah Temple, on Chogye Mountain, in Guangzhou, People’s Republic of China: he was the first Westerner to be ordained in the People’s Republic of China since the Communist Revolution.     He received bikkshu precepts at the Diamond Altar of Tong Do Sah Temple in Korea, one of the most sacred sites in the nation, and has been doing training in various remote mountain places, including 3 intensive 100-day solo meditation retreats and some twenty-five 3-month intensive meditation retreats.  In August 2001, he received inka from Zen Master Seung Sahn, the 78th Patriarch in a lineage stretching back to Shakyamuni Buddha.        He has compiled and edited several of Zen Master Seung Sahn's books, including The  Whole World is a Single Flower (Tuttle, 1992), The Compass of Zen (Shambhala Publications, 1997), Only Don't Know (Shambhala, revised 1999), and, most recently, Wanting Enlightenment is a Big Mistake (Shambhala, 2006).    He also translated the 500 year-old classic of Zen Master So Sahn, The Mirror of  Zen (Shambhala, 2007), into English for the first time.    Ven. Hyon Gak Sunim is also the author of the Korean bestseller, From Harvard to Hwa  Gye Sah Temple, an autobiography which became a major bestseller. The book is widely credited with leading a revival in interest in Korean Buddhism among Koreans, especially younger people.      Sunim is also the editor or translator of several best-selling translations into Korean of Zen Master Seung Sahn's English-language books.      The former Buddhist Chaplain at Harvard University, Ven. Hyon Gak Sumin has given  public talks at Harvard University, Yale University, Oxford University, Columbia  University, New York University, Brown University, Universite de Paris, University of  London, among many others, in addition to colleges, divinity schools, and countless  temples throughout Korea.