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By Root 732 0

of Ultraman, there is always a super-scientific task force whose job it is to protect the people of Earth, and one of them has the ability to transform into Ultraman. So what if that guy went power-mad? What if he decided to use the power of Ultraman for his own gain, and what if he got the rest of his task squad to back him up? I wanted children who watched my episode to understand that their leaders are people just like themselves, and that when rotten people are given power, they do rotten things.

That went over well with Muraishi and with the show’s producer, Masato Oida. What didn’t go over well was my inability to write convincing dialogue in Japanese. To that end, one of our staff’s pro writers, my friend Masakazu Migita, was drafted into service. The trouble started when Oida decided my story might be a little too “hard” for children. He asked that it should be made into something softer, more of a fantasy. In my draft, the alternate universe had been just like ours with a few minor changes—an expense-saving idea I’d stolen from Star Trek’s alternate universe episodes. It was Migita’s task to make my plot more fantastical. But as he did so, the very things I’d been trying to say in my original draft got more and more muddled. By making the alternate universe clearly different from our world, the point that our own real world could just as easily go that way (albeit without the giant heroes and monsters) got lost.

Meanwhile, I’d scheduled a trip to Mexico to meet my parents, who were thinking of retiring down there. The trip had been planned and paid for long before my script had been given the green light. Going to Mexico meant that I was leaving at the crucial time when Migita was doing the final rewrites. I wasn’t real happy with the version he was working on when I left, but there was little I could do. When I returned from Mexico, I found that the network had canceled our script at the last minute, even as preproduction work was being done on the show. Another writer was called in to throw together a more standard-issue Ultraman episode—which he pounded out in an afternoon, I’m told—and that went ahead instead.

At this point, despite the perfectness of my dream job, I realized that writing for Ultraman wasn’t really what I wanted to do.

I’d been getting more and more involved with Nishijima’s group. It was becoming clearer to me that teaching oblique Buddhist messages to kids through Ultraman might be okay (assuming I ever got an episode through production), but directly teaching the reality of Buddhist insights through Buddhism itself might make a whole lot more sense.

And that’s what I am going to do now, in this book. Bear with it in the next chapter.

Who knows? You might like it.

THE GREAT HEART OF WISDOM SUTRA

Come on, Milhouse, there’s no such

thing as a soul! It’s just something

they made up to scare kids, like the

Boogie Man or Michael Jackson.

BART SIMPSON

ON THE FIRST DAY of my first Zen class at Kent, Tim read aloud a translation of the Great Heart of Wisdom Sutra and I heard the phrase “That which is form is emptiness, that which is emptiness, is form.” When I heard that, I knew it was right. Granted I had no idea what it meant, but when he came to that line I had to struggle to keep from crying.

Hearing the Heart Sutra literally changed my life. It rocked my world in many subtle and not-so-subtle ways. Maybe it’ll have some kind of impact on you too. Or maybe not.

I’m going to present here the translation done by Tim’s teacher Kobun Chino since that was the first one I ever heard. When a baby duck hatches, the first thing he sees, he considers to be his mother, that’s called imprinting. In a very important way, this verse was the first thing I ever saw and so I’ve always considered it my mother (apologies to Mom here).

Try reading it once through without worrying too much about trying to understand it. That’s the way I first heard it. There’s some bizarre stuff, some arcane references and even a little bit of ancient Sanskrit. Don’t worry about it. Just let the words