Eshin Nishimura was born the youngest child of six siblings to a family of Rinzai practitioners. According to his own account, "Blessed with a profound karmic relationship with the Buddha, I entered the priesthood at age two and left my parents to live in a Zen temple as a priestling."[4] Nishimura graduated from Hanazono University from their Department of Buddhist Studies in 1956.[4] In 1969 he came to Oberlin College to give talks on Zen, and in 1970 and 1971 he taught a course for ten weeks on Zen at Carleton College[2] and another course at Carleton on Keiji Nishitani's Religion and Nothingness in 1989.