The Buddha's BLUE eyes not blue, says science

Fiona MacDonald (ScienceAlert.com, 1/18); Amber Larson, Dhr. Seven (eds.), Wisdom Quarterly

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The fascinating way blue eyes get their color

I have blue eyes, so I'm better than all y'all.

The human body is incredible. Our eyes aren't blue (or green) because of pigment in cells.

As Paul Van Slembrouck writes for Medium, their color is actually structural -- and it involves some pretty interesting physics.

 

The colored part of our eye is called the iris, and it's made up of two layers, the epithelium at the back and the stroma at the front.

 

The epithelium is only two cells thick and contains black-brown pigments. The dark specks that some people have in their eye is, in fact, the epithelium peeking through.

 

The stroma, in contrast, is made up of colorless collagen fibers. Sometimes the stroma contains a dark pigment called melanin, and sometimes it contains excess collagen deposits.
 

The Buddha DID have blue eyes

Dhr. Seven, Wisdom Quarterly; Dr. Ranajit Pal, Ph.D. (ranajitpal.com)

Origin of Blue Eyes: Ancient "Devas" and Their Royal Descendants (humansarefree.com)

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First representations

How could a dark Dravidian Indian have blue eyes? Anything is possible. But the historical Buddha -- the Scythian Sage/Prince Siddhartha Gautama or Shakya-muni -- was neither dark (he was golden skinned and fair), nor Dravidian (but Indo-Aryan/Indo-Iranian), nor Indian (but Central Asian from the region of modern Afghanistan in the south extending to Ukraine in the north, the real "Middle Country" (possibly a reference to mythical Agartha) between East and West. Many Central Asians have blue, green, and hazel eyes. See the "Story of the Lineage" (translation by Rhys Davids). His first anthropomorphic representation (rather than as a symbol of enlightenment or the path such as the bodhi tree or Dharma wheel) was from near his hometown, likely Bamiyan (one of his three seasonal capitals/hometowns along with Mes Aynak and Kabul/Kapilavastu), as made famous in Gandharan/Bactrian (Greco-Buddhist) art.

CONT'D: No one has blue eyes

But it looks blue! - But it's not! The "blue" is a structural illusion (cocoparisienne/Pixabay)

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Hazel eyes have the best of all worlds.

And, fascinatingly, it's these two factors that control our eye color.

 

Brown eyes, for example, contain a high concentration of melanin in their stroma, which absorbs most of the light entering the eye regardless of collagen deposits, giving them their dark color.

 

Green eyes don't have much melanin in them, but they also have no collagen deposits.

 

Eyes scatter light and pierce the onlooker.

This means that while some of the light entering them is absorbed by the pigment, the particles in the stroma also scatter light as a result of something called the Tyndall effect, which creates a blue hue.

(This is similar to Rayleigh scattering, which makes the sky look blue).

 

Combined with the brown melanin, this results in the eyes appearing green.

 

Blue eyes are potentially the most fascinating, as their color is entirely structural.
 

Brown eyes? If only I could buy blue contacts!

People with blue eyes have a completely colorless stroma with no pigment at all, and it also contains no excess collagen deposits.

 

This means that all the light that enters it is scattered back into the atmosphere and as a result of the Tyndall effect, creates a blue hue [or an illusion of it].

 

Interestingly, this means that blue eyes don't actually have a set color; it all depends on the amount of light available when we look at them.

 

What about black eyes, red eyes, cataracts?

Structural coloration also gives color to butterflies, dead cows, and berries. It's pretty mind-blowing stuff.

 

Van Slembrouck writes for Medium:

"Imagine that you could shrink yourself to a microscopic size and then climb through the mesh of fibres in the stroma. That's where structural colouration is coming from…

…and in the mesh are also strands of smooth muscle tissue that contract to dilate (expand) the pupil, pulling the inner edge of the iris toward the outer edge. When this happens, the stroma fibres slacken and may become wiggly as tension is released. This makes me wonder, does that slightly alter the colour of your eye as well?"

Check out Van Slembrouck's great story to find out how hazel and grey eyes get their color, and also to check out his beautiful diagrams that explain structural coloring. (Source: Medium via Science Alert)

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