A major difficulty in attempting to engage philosophical perspectives originating from beyond the horizons of European and American traditions is the tendency to assume default status for Western philosophical categories and questions. This leads, for example, to expending considerable energy considering whether Confucian or Buddhist ethics are best seen as species of consequentialism, deontology or virtue ethics, rather than trying to understand them as much as possible in their own terms. Doing so risks overwriting the philosophical distinctiveness of so-called “non-Western” traditions and tacitly justifying the continued definition of academic philosophy in terms of exclusively Western defaults. Being aware of these risks, however, I think it is nevertheless possible to make provisional use of Western categories to initiate exploration of philosophical terrains shaped by very different forces than those with which we are most familiar. That, at least, is the approach taken here with the aim of making it easier for students and teachers of philosophy to find some places from which they might enter into productive dialogue with Chan. 