There is little in Chan literature that could plausibly warrant positioning Chan wholly within any one of the standard Western categories of consequentialist, deontological and virtue ethics, or, for that matter, within such alternatives as communitarian or care ethics. Chan literature is notoriously silent about the kinds of questions to which ethics typically offers answers. Indeed, the recurrent valorizations of non-thinking (wunian), non-abiding (wuzhu, 無住) and non-reliance (wuyi, 無依) in the context of Chan’s nondualistic metaphysics and its idealization of responsive virtuosity suggest that if there is such a thing as Chan ethics it is an ethics of relational improvisation.