[1] Fred Eppsteiner is a Dharma teacher (Dharmacharya) in the lineage of Thich Nhat Hanh, has been a student of Buddhism and a practitioner of meditation for over fifty years and has devoted himself to teaching the Dharma (teachings of the Buddha) since 1996.
[2] Born and raised in a secular Jewish household,[3] Fred spent part of his youth engaged in social activism before encountering Buddhism in the late 1960s at the Rochester Zen Center in upstate New York with Philip Kapleau.
[5] After befriending Thích Nhất Hạnh, Eppsteiner traveled to India and studied Vajrayana-Dzogchen Buddhism from Tibetan monks.
[3] Eppsteiner became a member of the Order of Interbeing in 1983 and served as the editor for two of Thích Nhất Hạnh's books: The Path of Compassion: Writings on Socially Engaged Buddhism[6] and Interbeing: The Fourteen Precepts of Engaged Buddhism,[7][8] the latter establishing the framework for the Order of Interbeing.
In 1994, Eppsteiner received Dharma Transmission from Thich Nhất Hạnh, joining the lineage of the Linji school (Lâm Tế).