보(報)란 천하의 이익이다 ― 장재의 ‘報’ 개념에 대한 의미 재구성과 命/遇 재서술 ― = “Bao” as the Benefit of All Under Heaven - Reconstructing the Meaning of Zhang Zai’s Concept of Bao and Rearticulating Ming and Yu

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

This article examines how Zhang Zai, after defining bao (報) in “Yousi” (有司) of the Zhengmeng (正蒙) as “bao is the benefit of the world, accomplished by following virtue,” explains the experiential discrepancy that “the same conduct yields different recompense” while preserving the normative legitimacy of the Mandate of Heaven and the goodness of human nature. Since the pre-Qin period, bao has denoted both the structure of reciprocation within social exchange and the public cycle of response embedded in ritual institutions and systems of reward and punishment that encourage the good and restrain the bad. In particular, the statement in the “Biaoji” (表記) chapter of the Liji (禮記)—”bao is the benefit of the world”—positions bao not as the settlement of private emotions but as a criterion for the public efficacy produced by an ordered polity.
Zhang Zai inherits this classical framework but rearticulates bao as a normative idiom through which one may criticize and evaluate political practice. By locating the justificatory ground of bao in “the benefit of the world” and restricting its operative condition to “following virtue,” he reformulates bao so that it can function as a standard for assessing whether reward and punishment devolve into private retaliation or partisan manipulation of power. Yet if the empirical fact that virtuous action and fortune do not invariably align is left unaddressed, the discourse of bao risks immediately inviting suspicion about Heaven‘s fairness. To forestall this, Zhang Zai, in the Zhangzi yulu (張子語錄) and in “Jiancheng” (乾稱) of the Zhengmeng, introduces paired distinctions—nature and material force (xing/qi 性/氣), mandate and encounter (ming/yu 命/遇)—to separate explanatory levels. Differences in ability and achievement are explained not by gradations in nature but by endowment and the accumulation of habituated dispositions; and the phenomenon that identical moral conduct results in divergent auspices is attributed not to partiality in the mandate but to the contingent domain of encounter. In this way, ming remains the sphere of normative principle that can be upheld, whereas variations in fortune are allocated to yu, a domain in which responsibility is difficult to ascribe—thereby preventing moral judgment from being captured by the volatility of outcomes.
On this basis, bao is repositioned across two levels. Because personal fortune belongs to yu, self-cultivation should not take recompense as its motive; and because political and pedagogical reward and punishment are justified as bao only when governed by virtue and oriented toward “the benefit of the world,” they are subject to normative appraisal. Through this reconstruction, the article corrects readings that reduce bao to religious retribution or affective revenge, and it brings into view a distinctive feature of Zhang Zai’s argument: a single conceptual framework that links, on the one hand, the justification and evaluation of punitive and remunerative institutions, and on the other, the grounding of moral motivation.