The provisional nature of Chan declarations exemplified in this encounter and even more apparent in some Chan teachers’ use of physical gestures like raising a finger, wiggling eyebrows or killing a cat in response to students’ questions was a lightning rod for criticism. If Chan teachings can include contradictory statements and such gruesome acts as killing a cat, what is to prevent the truth of nondualism from spurring an antinomian erasure of the boundaries not only between sense and nonsense, but also between the moral and immoral? This was a concern for even such eminent Buddhist thinkers as Guifeng Zongmi (780–841), a lineage holder in both the Huayan School and the Heze Chan lineage, who argued that if any kind of speech or action can be the functioning of Buddha-nature, then what is to stop hatred and gratuitous violence from being seen as “liberating” (Xu zangjing, Vol. 110.435d)?