Time to play the role of me being "Ms Myth Buster!" Ok, right off the top I know many of you are gonna be thinking, "Is she off her rocker?" Everyone knows Buddha was a gentle man, with almost a cherub like build, and he was Asian. Well that is all well and good as far as legends go, but what about Prince Siddhartha the man? Who was he? A good many of you know that the abundance of ancient images depicting Buddha with an Oriental racial structure are mistaken. These came from the great popularity of Buddhism in China, Japan and the Orient in general. And most of you know that Buddha was actually of Indian descent. So why have I shown Siddhartha with darkish Caucasian skin tones? Well it may surprise you to know that while Buddha was indeed an Indian Prince he was in fact descended from a race of invaders. He was what we now call Indo-Aryan. These people originated on the steppes of the Ukraine and swept eastwards conquering the region of Afghanistan and eventually, by the 7th century B.C., all of India. So Siddhartha would have had a complexion considerably paler than most East Indians. More like a native of Afghanistan. But surely in the hundreds of years that these people were in power in India they would have interbred with the locals and so Buddha should have had an Indian complexion? No? Well no indeed. For it was this group of people that started India's caste system and it was strictly forbidden for intermarriage between Siddhartha's people and the populace that they conquered. Especially for the princely warrior class Siddhartha was born into. So it is most highly probable that Buddha looked at most like a dark Caucasian. Ok, but what about all those images of a pudgy Buddha? What about all those gentle and serenely beautiful Chinese watercolors. All propaganda! All from the Pali Canon, a series of texts written about the life of Buddha in the first century A. D., some 400 hundred years after his death! In fact the earliest texts about Buddha, the Nikaya's, describe him as a big, strong man - it has been surmised that he was probably in the order of 6 feet tall. So why muscular and not soft like the laughing Buddha dolls? Well Siddhartha was born as the first son of a regional warlord, near Nepal and Bengal. The Indo-Arayan's regarded war as the highest calling for a man and all able-bodied men trained to be warriors from childhood. Yes, I know, the scriptures say that Siddhartha was born the son of a king and raised in luxury and that he never got to see disease, old age and death until he was a young man. Seeing these conditions supposedly freaked him out so much that he renounced his earthly goods and became a wandering ascetic. This is just so much revisionist poppycock. In Siddhartha's time if his father had let his son be raised in luxury the other warlords would have risen in revolt and killed them both! It was sacrilege to live a soft, privileged life style. Instead, early texts describe Siddhartha as being trained in the military from the age of six, and becoming recognized as a knight warrior at age 16. He then had to demonstrate a number of martial skills including proficiency with bow, sword, spear, club, horsemanship, swimming and hand to hand combat. Only then did his father recognize him as heir apparent and the other nobles were satisfied that Siddhartha could competently lead them into battle. Given the almost steady state of war on the Indian subcontinent at that time there is little doubt that Siddhartha had experienced considerable combat by the time he reached 29 years of age - the age at which he gave up military life and became an ascetic. Buddha never got the chance to become soft and pudgy! The Nikayas record that at first Buddha continued to carry a broadsword, wore his hair in a warrior's topknot and rode his charger Kanthaka. It is this vision of the Buddha that I show here. Still Siddhartha; a young man just beginning his journey to enlightenment, a journey that would take him to being Buddha.