Blue Skies Buddha – Rama Biography

(by Liz L)   When Rama first started teaching meditation as a solo teacher, he often instructed audience members to lightly “gaze in my direction.”  In that manner, thousands of manifestations of liquid golden light were witnessed by thousands of people.  Blue Skies Buddha, the biography of Rama – Dr. Frederick Lenz, originally was self-published as Rama Gaze in My Direction.  That was a fine title, but I soon felt that the title was geared towards students and friends, and I did not write this biography just for the people who knew Rama.  I wrote it for the people who would soon get to know Rama.  That’s you!

I pondered a new title for most of this past year.  Many different titles came to mind, rose-like flowers in the desert and quietly disappeared.

One day, I was visiting my cousin in Laguna Beach, California.  She has a five-year-old daughter named Harper.  At the end of a day of family fun, she picked Harper up, balanced her on her hip, and said, “Cousin Liz is looking for a new title for her book.  It’s about a very nice man who was a Buddhist and he helped a lot of people.”  Harper had her arms around her Mom.  She immediately looked me in the eyes and said in a firm, no-nonsense voice, “Blue Skies Buddha.”

OH.   Blue skies – optimism, openness, no boundaries.  Like Rama.

Then I happened to be rereading Rama’s book of advanced Buddhist concepts, Snowboarding to Nirvana, and I realized that for all three of his initiations with the two monks he describes in that book, he began his entrance into samadhi by visualizing a brilliant blue sky and merging with it.   I had another aha moment.  Rama is the Blue Skies Buddha.

The Blue Sky Meditation practice from Snowboarding to Nirvana is now at the back of the biography, published by MB (Mystic Buddha) Publishing House.

For reviews and more blogs, see FrederickLenzBio.com. The paperback is on Amazon! NOTE: 2017 Updated title – American Buddhist Rebel.