Chan presents ethical life as both firmly grounded in traditional Buddhist precepts and at the same time inseparable from the realization of one’s Buddha‑nature. Monastics take the familiar Five Precepts and further monastic vows, and Chan communities have detailed regulations governing speech, sexuality, use of resources, and communal behavior. These precepts are understood as skillful means and training tools rather than as external commandments, providing a stable framework that reduces agitation and supports meditative practice. For lay followers, the same ethical foundations extend into family, livelihood, and social responsibility, emphasizing honesty, restraint, and non‑harming as the bedrock of practice.

At a deeper level, Chan treats ethics as the natural expression of an awakened mind. When the mind is clarified through meditation and insight into emptiness and non‑self, the grasping that fuels harmful behavior is undermined, and compassion arises spontaneously. In this view, moral conduct is not merely a matter of conforming to rules, but the unobstructed functioning of a mind free from delusion. Recognizing the interconnectedness of all beings, harming others is seen as ultimately harming oneself, so ethical sensitivity and compassionate action become the most natural way to live.

Chan teachings often speak of going “beyond good and evil,” or of “no precepts,” yet this does not license moral laxity. Rather, it points to a non‑dual perspective in which ultimate reality is beyond conceptual divisions, while conventional ethical distinctions remain fully operative in daily life. True freedom, in this sense, is not the freedom to indulge impulse, but the freedom to respond appropriately for the benefit of beings. Stories of shouts, blows, or paradoxical actions by Chan masters are framed within this strict ethical container: they are contextual teaching methods intended to cut through delusion, not excuses for arbitrary behavior.

Ethical conduct, meditation, and wisdom thus form an indivisible triad in Chan. Precepts stabilize the mind so that meditation can deepen; meditation reveals the mind’s original clarity; and from that clarity, compassionate, discerning conduct flows back into the world. Ordinary activities—work, community life, family relations—become the field where this integrated understanding is tested and refined. In this way, Chan ethics is both rigorously disciplined and profoundly alive, grounded in rules yet pointing beyond them to a way of being in which moral conduct is simply the natural activity of an awakened heart‑mind.