The Cauldron of American Buddhism

Brother Pháp Lưu: You were integral in
working with Thầy to formulate the Order of
Interbeing (OI) charter, to envision what the
OI could be, and how it would work.
Fred Eppsteiner: When I met him in 1975
and he first started telling me about the OI,
being both young and impetuous, I said,
“Please ordain me right now!” [Laughter] But
he was very reluctant because he was in this
transition phase in his life and he didn’t know
whether the OI had any life after Vietnam.
He had not yet taken it beyond the context
of Vietnam and the original six members [the
Six Cedars]. He clearly indicated “Not yet,”
because he didn’t know the future.
But when I saw him again in the early ’80s,
he said, “It’s time.” Right before that, he had
ordained Anh Hương. He came to [Mount]
Tremper [at Zen Mountain Monastery] in 1983
to lead a retreat and he ordained me there. I
think out of that came his willingness to publish and thereby make public The Fourteen
Mindfulness Trainings and his commentary.1
Truth is, he really didn’t need me for content and any heavy editing of his text. He only
needed me to help him adapt his language
to how American Buddhists say things. He
had a good grasp of English; it was simply
that he didn’t know the lexicon of American
Buddhism.
PL: What challenges do you find to be Thầy’s
continuation as a teacher, especially in the
US—or just generally?
FE: Right from the beginning of our relationship, Thầy was very clear with me: American
Buddhism has to be American. He said that
wherever Buddhism went, it always adapted
itself and expressed itself in and through
the culture. American Buddhism has to be
expressed in the idiom of the American language. It has to be expressed in the idiom
of American arts and American music. He
also strongly emphasized the importance of
experimentation: don’t think you know the
right way, always experiment, and always be
open. It was wonderful to work with him on
the translation of the [OI] charter. It is one of
the great documents he wrote when he was
more non-denominational in his approach.
He guided us to be open to see the wisdom
in all the schools of Buddhism and that
Buddhism always has to be renewing itself at
the source. I have done my best to be very experimental. The OI is not just a transmission
of the teachings and the practices, but goes
deeper and is much more personal because it
is founded on living community relationships.
PL: One young OI, who just ordained this
year, read the charter and noticed that we’re
supposed to get together every twenty years
and update the precepts. What do you think
about that?
FE: I think we’re supposed to get together
every three years.
PL: Was it every three years? [Laughter]
FE: Originally Plum Village was supposed to
be the home of the OI. The OI was going to
be Thầy’s legacy: he was creating this order
in which monks, nuns, and laypeople would
all be equal and share the same principles.
It was a radical vision, especially if you know
about Vietnamese Buddhism or traditional
Asian Buddhism.
But once his books started getting published and he began to give retreats and
workshops and became more in demand,
he was “discovered.” The number of people
going to retreats with Thầy increased in the
’80s to the hundreds, when before there’d be
maybe thirty or forty people there. [Laughter]
The loss of intimacy with Thầy was painful for
some people, but his influence just grew so
quickly, almost exponentially year by year,
and there was great demand for his personal
presence and teaching.

During this rapid growth period, some
of the original OI community of laypeople
in Plum Village would leave after being
there for a few years. Being laypeople,
their lives pulled them in varied directions
and I think Thầy needed people he could
count on year after year. He began to look
more and more to the monastic community for this stability and put more of his
energy into nurturing it as his continuation. Much of the charter—the Council
of Elders and how it’s supposed to meet
every three years—just never happened.
PL: There’s a question that came to me
just as you were talking. Thầy had said
early on in his peace activism in the US
that we should try to figure out where
the violence was coming from and how
to transform the situation. Now when
I ask myself, “What are we doing as a
monastic community or as a larger Plum
Village international community?” I see that
we’re transforming collective consciousness.
We’re not here to promote Buddhism. It’s
not even necessarily about promoting
mindfulness—although that’s a very helpful
way to transform collective consciousness.
Retreats are a way of transforming collective
consciousness because you get people to
come on retreat and then you all practice
together. We all practice and then the
collective consciousness is changed by that.
That’s an effective way, but retreats aren’t
necessarily the only way. The real question
is, how do we facilitate transformation in the
collective consciousness and grow awakened
people? This speaks to what you shared
about Thầy’s emphasis on experimentation.
I’m seeing that in the monastic communities
we can get caught in doing things by rote:
we do these retreats every year and that’s
our schedule and we forget about the larger

vision. I respect that you’re one of the lay
Dharma teachers who is actually building
community and teaching actively. When I
hear from someone in your community, I
think, “Fred’s right on. He’s got it.”
FE: Well, you see people from your side,
right? They come to Deer Park on retreat,
and in that controlled environment, they get
solid pieces of Thay’s Dharma, or they stop
long enough that they can get in touch with
buried parts of themselves. That’s what you
see. What I see, living in Florida, is when they
come back, the forces of our materialistic and
consumer culture are strong. If you read Zen
Keys, written in the early days when Thầy
had a more radical critique of materialism
and consumerism, he was clear that unless
human minds are changed, you can advocate
for protecting the planet from climate change
and all the good things forever. Materialism,
consumerism, climate change: they’re all
symptoms of how human beings have lost
touch with who we are.
This is a sadness of mine: you can go to
any urban area in America and you’ll find a
Zen center, you’ll find a Tibetan center, you’ll
find an Insight meditation center, and you
won’t find a Thích Nhất Hạnh center. They’ll
be meeting in some little church basement.
If you’re asking me about the big picture,
that’s what’s missing. The energy went into
the monastic community and the residential
centers, which is wonderful. But like Thầy
said, people can’t practice by themselves.
Going to Plum Village or Deer Park once or
twice a year can’t offset these other delusive
forces that are in American culture and in
their own storehouse consciousness.
You get people in ideal conditions when
they’re on retreat. They’re away from their
daily life, and they’re away from their responsibilities. You incubate them for five or seven
days, or two or three weeks. And they change,
right? Because those negative, afflictive,
or delusive seeds within them aren’t being

watered—only positive seeds are watered.
The monastic community is wonderful at
watering positive seeds, and so people thrive.
And then when they come back home, unless
there’s something to hold them and continue
to support them, it’s very difficult for them to
really maintain that transformation. So you
get a kind of a syndrome where people think,
“I gotta get back to Deer Park” or “I gotta get
back to Plum Village” to get this sort of a fix.
It’s a good fix.
PL: It makes me think of how we’re trying our
best here to create more extensive training
programs in house. So instead of just having
retreats, we proposed a program here at
Deer Park for staying here to train for fifteen
months. This would be mainly for young people
at the moment, maybe coming out of college, where they do two back-to-back Rains
Retreats and in between, live in a community
near the monastery doing some service connecting with the local community, but also
practicing or possibly even working. I know
Thầy started the movements of mindfulness
practice centers, and there have been Wake
Up houses, but they last for a couple of years
and then they disappear. This new program
would try to seed long-term lay communities
in the Plum Village tradition in urban centers.
FE: In his early writings about the OI, Thầy
said there has to be one person to hold it,
to be at the core of each lay sangha. One
person dedicated to practice, somewhat
charismatic. Brother, this whole society is
falling apart so quickly. Now, everywhere
you look, the suffering and the delusion are
increasing. The greed, the anger, the fear....
These are difficult times, when all hands have
to be on deck. If you ask me, seasoned monastics could move out part of the year into
the broader community and be in residence
at these various sanghas to provide those
seeds and that training in the communities
where these people live. Having spent the
last fifteen to twenty years doing that, I know
if we could build a community like we’ve built
here in Tampa, Florida, you can build them
anywhere.
PL: Fred, how do you nourish your spiritual
practice day in and day out? Because I think
the main issue with monastics is that we feel
nourished every day living as a community
with the other monastics, in terms of our precepts body, in terms of our daily practice. You
really have to have internal discipline if you’re
going to go out even just as a small group of
monastics to a center in an urban area. That’s
the main reason why we don’t do it. It’s not
because we don’t feel inspired. We just have
to learn how to nourish our daily practice
when there are fewer conditions around us
to support it.
FE: [Laughter] Do you want me to give you
the simple answer?
PL: [Laughter] Okay!
FE: Bodhicitta.
PL: Yeah.
FE: What has nourished me for the last fifty
years? Bodhicitta. The desire to wake up, to
be free, to benefit people.
I think once you have an inner connection, an inner refuge, where the Buddha, the
Dharma, the Sangha, and Thầy live in your
heart, that always nourishes you. That’s
what always nourishes me. But again, I’m
not alone; I am very fortunate that I’ve been
able to inspire others and we have a large OI
community. I have a community; you have a
community. It’s wonderful to build things with
people. I just love to practice the Dharma.
When I received the Lamp Transmission from
Thầy, I thought, “Since Thầy has ordained me
as a Dharma teacher then, I need to start
teaching.” I began in my home living room

in the mid-nineties, and all of a sudden here
I am, thirty years later with a community of
over three hundred. I am much more than a
Dharma teacher these days. I’m more like a
village priest. I have a congregation that experiences birth, sickness, old age, and death,
has all types of issues, and all along I share
the Dharma to nourish and support them. It’s
wonderful.
Thầy was a monk, true to his vows. But
again, when I first encountered him, he was
living with laypeople. Plum Village in the early
years was primarily a lay community. Thay
was wonderful, he was seamless.
PL: Thank you so much, Fred, for your time.
It’s very lovely to connect with you.
FE: Thầy has passed. So, the future direction
of the community is being created now. This
creates that. I see great thirst. I see great
yearning. I think there’s a need for Dharma.
It doesn’t have to be packaged with capital
Ds, or capital Bs. The Buddhist teachings are
priceless and really speak to people’s suffering. Thầy empowered us as Dharma teachers,
and he wants us to teach the Dharma to people in creative ways, experimental ways, but
always preserving its spirit.
This is an excerpt from an online interview with
Fred Eppsteiner in September 2024. It has been
edited for length and clarity. An extended version is
available at mindfulnessbell.org.
1 Thích Nhất Hạnh, Interbeing: The 14 Mindfulness
Trainings of Engaged Buddhism (Berkeley, CA:
Parallax Press, 1987).
Pages 32, 34-35: a letter from Thầy to Fred in 1974
Brother Pháp Lưu's bio can be found on page 3
Fred Eppsteiner, a Dharma teacher in the
lineage of Thích Nhất Hạnh, has been a
student of Buddhism and a practitioner of
meditation for over fifty years and has devoted
himself to teaching the Dharma since 1996.
Although Fred has practiced primarily in
the Zen and Tibetan Buddhist lineages, he
bases his teachings on the full breadth of
Buddhist philosophical, psychological, and
meditative traditions. For more information,
visit floridamindfulness.org

Bridging East and West,
Contemplation and Action
An interview with Brother Pháp Lưu by Sister Tại Nghiêm
on the spirit of the Order of Interbeing
and Engaged Buddhism