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Tuesday, May 6th, 2025
| Time | Event |
| 6:17a | The Hobo Ethical Code of 1889: 15 Rules for Living a Self-Reliant, Honest & Compassionate Life
Who wants to be a billionaire? A few years ago, Forbes published author Roberta Chinsky Matuson’s sensible advice to businesspeople seeking to shoot up that golden ladder. These lawful tips espoused such familiar virtues as hard work and community involvement, and as such, were easily adaptable to the rabble—artists, teachers, anyone in the service industry or non-profit sector… It must pain her that so many billionaires have been behaving so badly of late. Let’s hope so, anyway. While there’s nothing inherently wrong with aspiring to amass lots of money, the next generation of billionaires is playing fast and loose with their souls if their primary role models are the ones dominating today’s headlines. Wouldn’t it be grand if they looked instead to the Hobo Ethical Code, a serious standard of behavior established at the Hobo National Convention of 1889? Given the peripatetic lifestyle of these migratory workers, it was up to the individual to hold himself or herself to this knightly standard. Hoboes prided themselves on their self-reliance and honesty, as well as their compassion for their fellow humans. The environment and the most vulnerable members of our society stand to benefit if tomorrow’s billionaires take it to heart. The Hobo Ethical Code 1. Decide your own life; don’t let another person run or rule you. 2. When in town, always respect the local law and officials, and try to be a gentleman at all times. 3. Don’t take advantage of someone who is in a vulnerable situation, locals or other hobos. 4. Always try to find work, even if temporary, and always seek out jobs nobody wants. By doing so you not only help a business along, but ensure employment should you return to that town again. 5. When no employment is available, make your own work by using your added talents at crafts. 6. Do not allow yourself to become a stupid drunk and set a bad example for locals’ treatment of other hobos. 7. When jungling in town, respect handouts, do not wear them out, another hobo will be coming along who will need them as badly, if not worse than you. 8. Always respect nature, do not leave garbage where you are jungling. 9. If in a community jungle, always pitch in and help. 10. Try to stay clean, and boil up wherever possible. 11. When traveling, ride your train respectfully, take no personal chances, cause no problems with the operating crew or host railroad, act like an extra crew member. 12. Do not cause problems in a train yard, another hobo will be coming along who will need passage through that yard. 13. Do not allow other hobos to molest children; expose all molesters to authorities…they are the worst garbage to infest any society. 14. Help all runaway children, and try to induce them to return home. 15. Help your fellow hobos whenever and wherever needed, you may need their help someday. Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2016. Related Content: The Hobo Code: An Introduction to the Hieroglyphic Language of Early 1900s Train-Hoppers The Power of Empathy: A Quick Animated Lesson That Can Make You a Better Person Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Her play Zamboni Godot is opening in New York City in March 2017. Follow her @AyunHalliday. |
| 9:00a | A Japanese Zen Monk Explains What Zen Is Really About
Despite developing in Asia, as the Chinese form of a religion originally brought over from India and later refined in Japan, Zen Buddhism has long appealed to Westerners as well. Some of that owes to the spare, elegant aesthetics with which popular culture associates it, and more to the promise it holds out: freedom from stress, anxiety, and indeed suffering of all kinds. In theory, the Zen practitioner attains that freedom not through mastering a body of knowledge or ascending a hierarchy, but through direct experience of reality, unmediated by thoughts, unwarped by desires, and undivided by the classification schemes that separate one thing from another. That’s easier said than done, of course, and for some, not even a lifetime of meditation does the trick. In the interview clip above, Rinzai zen monk Yodo Kono explains how he arrived in the world of Zen. Having come from a line of monks, he inherited the role after the deaths of his grandfather and his father. Already in his late twenties, he’d been working as a physics teacher, an occupation that — however fashionable the supposed concordances between advanced physical and Buddhist truths — hardly prepared him for the rigors of the temple. “I entered a role completely opposite to logic,” he remembers, “a world where logic doesn’t exist.” Think of the Zen kōans we’ve all heard, which demand seemingly impossible answers about the sound of one hand clapping, or the appearance of your face before your parents were born.
Advised by his master to stop trying to gain knowledge, skills, and understanding, the frustrated Yodo Kono began to realize that “Zen is everything,” the key question being “how to live without worries within Zen.” That can’t be learned from any amount of study, but experience alone. Only directly can one feel how we create our own suffering in our minds, and also that we can’t help but do so. This leaves us no choice but to relinquish our notions of control over reality. In daily life, he explains in the clip just above (also from the documentary Freedom From Suffering, about the varieties of Buddhism), one must be able to move freely between “the undivided Zen world and the divided world,” the latter being where nearly all of us already spend our days: not without our pleasures, of course, but also not without wondering, every so often, if we can ever know permanent satisfaction.
Related content: A 6‑Step Guide to Zen Buddhism, Presented by Psychiatrist-Zen Master Robert Waldinger What Is a Zen Koan? An Animated Introduction to Eastern Philosophical Thought Experiments Exercise Extreme Mindfulness with These Calming Zen Rock Garden Videos A Beatboxing Buddhist Monk Creates Music for Meditation Buddhism 101: A Short Introductory Lecture by Jorge Luis Borges Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall. |
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