Monasticism in the World of Mortals

On a thunderstorm night in 1990, Zeng Da happened in Taiping Village in southeastern Yunnan. Grandma said: "This child is different from other children." He almost died from intussusception at six months. After graduating from elementary school, he was admitted to the county No. 1 Middle school, but was assigned to the sixteenth class at the bottom. After graduating from college, he grew Panax notoginseng, climbed iron towers, delivered express delivery, sold insurance, and did electric welding. After trading in futures, he lost all his father's 20-year fir tree money in one week. He was defrauded of his hard-earned money by a fake car, and was chased by online loans to Shenzhen's Luohu Port. He owed nearly 400,000 yuan on compound profits. On the most depressing night, my father put out the cigarette butt on the sole of his shoe and said one word: "Let's go." This is not an inspirational story, but a living record of a person practicing Taoism in the world of mortals. The industrial details are hard-core and solid: the selection of acidic and alkaline welding rods, argon arc welding process parameters, hospital purified water pipeline specifications, and the spatial logic of shipyard segmentation drawings. In the sweltering heat of the construction site's welding and pipe gallery, a low-level worker looked up at the stars in a cramped place. He finally understood that he was just a "temporary combination of 4.6 Billion years of stardust", but before this body disintegrated, he had to use his hands full of weld scars to turn the promises to his family into numbers on the bankbook, and turn the confusion of fate into qualified welds for flaw detection. The core of the book is hidden in one sentence: "If the first brew is not thrown away, the true flavor of the tea will not come out." His vanity, inferiority, and eagerness for quick success and quick gain have been thrown out. For the rest of his life, he practiced Taoism in the world of mortals.