Ali Ali Abadi is an Iranian-American writer who is a science nerd and a lover of classical music. In this episode, we discuss his short book, "On Martial Arts, Zen, and the Blue Eyed, Blue-Eyed, Red-Bearded Barbarian: Was Buddha the founder of Shaolin Kung Fu Chinese? Was Zen Buddhism created by a Japanese sage? Did he know that original descriptions and writings from China and elsewhere describe Buddha with European and Nordic features? And did he know Caucasians roamed the Tarim Basin a thousand years before East Asians? We ll discuss this and much more.
00:00:28.200This is Radio 314 on the Red Ice Radio Network.
00:00:45.840Welcome, everyone. This is Lana. Thanks for joining me.
00:00:48.780You will love, well, at least I hope you will, the interview with my next guest, Ali Ali Abadi, who is of Iranian origin.
00:00:55.560He has a science background and is obsessed with classical music.
00:00:59.200We're going to discuss his short book called On Martial Arts, Zen, and the Blue-Eyed, Red-Bearded Barbarian.
00:01:06.860Was the founder of Shaolin Kung Fu Chinese? Was Zen Buddhism created by a Japanese sage?
00:01:13.320Did you know that original descriptions and writings from China and elsewhere describe Buddha with European and even Nordic features?
00:01:20.060Did you know Caucasians roamed the Tarim Basin a thousand years before East Asians?
00:01:26.480We'll discuss this and much more, so get comfortable because you're about to hear of an Indo-European descended wanderer into the Far East named Budi Heed Dharma,
00:01:36.220the Red-Bearded Barbarian, a venerated man in the Orient.
00:01:58.700I've been in the United States since the age of eight, since 1984.
00:02:02.700And in Iran, I was fascinated and actually obsessed by everything American, which at that time, for me and for many other Iranians, Native America meant blonde-haired, blue-eyed America.
00:02:19.320So, we were fascinated by Europeans of fair complexion.
00:02:23.260And in Iran, we still have a minority of fair complexion Iranians, some of whom are my relatives.
00:02:33.220And I've always been fascinated by them and everything American.
00:02:37.680From there, as I came to the United States, when I emigrated, I essentially went through a phase of America worship.
00:02:47.600And as the book says that you read, a fascination with blonde-haired, blue-eyed Americans, which then burgeoned and segued into an interest in their culture, Western culture and Western civilization, which I always had a profound respect for from a child's viewpoint.
00:03:06.580But as I matured, I became a teenager's viewpoint and then finally an adult's viewpoint.
00:03:35.560So, I picked up everything I could by Robert E. Howard, the author of Conan the Barbarian.
00:03:41.200I was reading stories of H. Ryder Haggard, the British Victorian romance adventure historical author who wrote Alan Quartermain, she and the minds of King Solomon's Mines, excuse me.
00:03:56.360So, they all dealt with, including Robert E. Howard, they dealt with civilizations that were in the most awkward of places.
00:04:04.960For example, deep, dark Africa, where you have a white queen ruling over savages.
00:04:10.200And you also had instances where Conan goes to the jungles and he finds ruins and he finds the leadership who are essentially mixed or some sort of mulatto-esque creation or result of an ancient, higher, more advanced people.
00:04:29.040So, this kind of stuff was the stuff of science fiction and fantasy, but essentially I later found out that as I segued into non-fiction, specifically the works of Thor Heyerdahl, I noticed that this was a theme that many of these adventurers and these great imaginative fiction authors had purloined from non-fiction authors, archaeologists and whatnot.
00:04:55.060So, Thor Heyerdahl afterwards was a big influence on me and his books such as Aku Aku and, good lord, I can't remember the other names of his, Fatu Hiva was one of his other works.
00:05:09.240And his magnum opus in which he discovered, as he went on a balsam raft, he went from South America to Easter Island and he kept making references of these creator gods and myths of a fair complexion man or men who came from the land of the rising sun, that is the east,
00:05:30.740and brought civilization and brought civilization and culture, animal husbandry, astronomy, religion, literature, writing, philosophy, essentially everything related to a culture and civilization, they brought to the new world, to the indigenous Amerindian people.
00:05:47.060And then later on in my other works, I essentially became fascinated by other tales, for example, Sir Oral Stein who talked about the Tocharian or Sogdian settlements and Buddhist frescoes in Taklamakan Desert and how the Buddhist monks were proselytizing to the far east to great China.
00:06:11.040And so all of these essentially brewed in my mind's eye and finally came to fruition with that little ditty that I wrote and which you read.
00:06:22.100And it's been many years of building upon what turned out to be a childish interest in things American, as silly as Hollywood movies, to things I think that are much less flippant,
00:06:37.020namely ancient meanderings and travails of Nordic people that have shown evidence from Polynesia to South America to even the southwestern United States where the swastika is found,
00:06:53.920to ancient Chinese stories of blonde-haired emperors in the 4th century, Emperor Ming,
00:07:00.020all the way to the Eurasian plateaus, the steppes of Russia, of Siberian Russia, and of course to the Middle East as well.
00:07:09.460So I think that basically speaking, Nordics are the most intrepid race there is and their heritage has been found throughout the globe.
00:07:20.560And I know you've had several other intrepid mavericks there, such as Mr. Nugent, that have spoken about the Solutrean people
00:07:29.160and all these little very politically inconvenient facts coming out about some bog in Florida showing Caucasian genotype or phenotypes
00:07:41.000and the designs being Celtic, not Amerindian, and all of this information about Indian myths, for example, the red-haired giants of Nevada,
00:07:51.200which the Paiutes apparently exterminated tens of centuries ago, however long ago.
00:07:57.820All of these, I think, go together to build a picture that the world had some sort of Nordic influence throughout,
00:08:06.280and that's what I try to claim, a specific part actually, I try to make a thesis of dealing with the founder of meditation or Zen Buddhism,
00:08:17.120who was also mythologically, perhaps even historically, the founder of Shaolin Kung Fu, as well as a great figure in Far Eastern Buddhism.
00:08:26.720That's right, you present evidence that the founder of Buddhism, martial arts, and the Zen philosophy
00:08:31.120was an Indo-European descended wanderer into the Far East.
00:08:34.940So tell us about the man named Bodhidharma. Am I saying it right?
00:08:39.100Yeah, Bodhidharma, yes. Bodhidharma means Enlightenment Law, and it comes from the Sanskrit.
00:08:45.500And he apparently was, if memory serves me properly, a 6th century prince,
00:08:51.880who the Buddhist hagiographers claim was the 28th descendant of Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha himself.
00:09:00.080And if you recall from the work, one of the traits of being an enlightened being is to have blue eyes,
00:09:08.940which one might think, what does that have to do with Buddhism,
00:09:12.300since most of the people who practice Buddhism are of Mongoloid descent?
00:09:16.860They are of Far Eastern Asiatic descent.
00:09:19.260Well, that again traces the Scythian, if you will, Nordic heritage of Buddhism to its rightful place.
00:09:28.300If you go still to places like Kashmir and northern India and Nepal, you still find green-eyed,
00:09:36.240perhaps they're Mongol-eyed, but they do have green eyes, blue eyes, reddish-copper hair, etc.