The Formless Track is a music, visual art and live performance project built from danceable, rhythmic Dharma seeds. Like rolling prayer wheels, its music, images and teachings spin admonitions for practice, for waking up and travelling the Buddha Way. 

Hyon Gak Sunim is an American Zen Master, author and teacher who has practised and taught within the Korean Zen tradition for more than three decades.

Born Paul J. Muenzen in New Jersey in 1964, he studied literature, literary theory and philosophy at Yale University, graduating in 1987, before completing a Master of Theological Studies in comparative religion at Harvard Divinity School in 1992.

He first met the legendary Korean Zen Master Seung Sahn in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1989 and became his student. In 1992, Seung Sahn ordained him as a monk at the Temple of the Sixth Patriarch on Chogye Mountain in China, making Hyon Gak Sunim the first Westerner to be ordained in the People’s Republic of China since the Communist Revolution.

Over the following decades he undertook intensive monastic and meditation training throughout Asia, including three 100-day solitary retreats and around forty three-month intensive meditation retreats.

In August 2001, at Hwa Gye Sah Temple outside Seoul, Hyon Gak Sunim received inka from Zen Master Seung Sahn following a public Dharma-combat examination before an assembly of monks and nuns. The authorization formally recognised his realization and his capacity to teach within Seung Sahn’s Zen tradition.

The following year, Seung Sahn appointed him Guiding Teacher of the Zen Hall at Hwa Gye Sah, the temple that had served as Seung Sahn’s principal base in Korea for some fifty years. Hyon Gak Sunim also served for a period as his teacher’s secretary and teaching representative.

Alongside his monastic practice, Hyon Gak Sunim became one of the most widely recognised Western voices in contemporary Korean Buddhism. His Korean-language book From Harvard to Hwa Gye Sah Temple, first published in 1999, became a major bestseller and was credited with stimulating renewed interest in Buddhist practice among younger and educated Koreans. His translations, editing and teaching of works by Zen Master Seung Sahn further extended his influence.

In 2010, Hyon Gak Sunim chose to teach independently of the organisational structure of the Kwan Um School of Zen while remaining deeply faithful to the practice and teaching methods transmitted to him by Zen Master Seung Sahn.

After many years of teaching extensively in Korea, Europe and the United States, he settled in Germany. His work continues to combine rigorous meditation practice with a direct, contemporary and often unconventional approach to communicating Zen.

Hyon Gak Sunim is currently establishing a new Zen centre in Bavaria and continues to teach students internationally.

Arman Ray is a British visual artist, electronic music producer and former Design Council Education Officer whose work has moved between fine art, digital imaging, music and contemporary spiritual culture for more than four decades.

He was among an early generation of British artists exploring the creative possibilities of digital imaging, developing work at a time when computer-based image making was only beginning to enter mainstream artistic practice. Alongside his own work, he served as an Education Officer at the Design Council, contributing to wider discussion around design, technology and visual culture.

His visual practice has continued across photography, digital imaging, mixed media and exhibition work. Major projects have included Transcendent Perceptions, shown in Seven Dials, London, and at the Red Fort in Delhi; Self and Other at The Asylum Gallery; and a substantial retrospective exhibition in 2017.

Throughout his career, Ray has been interested in the point at which contemporary technology, image making and questions of consciousness meet. Rather than treating digital tools as an end in themselves, his work has consistently used them as vehicles for exploring perception, identity and transformation.

In recent years that enquiry has extended increasingly into electronic music. Working with rhythm, sampled and spoken voice, visual imagery and digital production, he has developed a body of work that draws on both club culture and contemplative practice without attempting to turn either into illustration for the other.

For the past six years, Ray has worked in close collaboration with Zen Master Hyon Gak Sunim, a disciple of Zen Master Seung Sahn. Their collaboration has developed into The Formless Track, a music, visual art and live performance project that brings Zen teaching into dialogue with contemporary electronic culture.

Within The Formless Track, Ray creates the music, visual material and overall structure of the project, transforming teachings and spoken material into beat-driven works intended not simply for passive listening, but as contemporary vehicles for practice, attention and awakening.

He continues to develop his independent visual-art practice alongside The Formless Track.