All Sages

Figures whose authority rests on wisdom rather than on revelation, office or descent, which makes this the widest heading in the category and the loosest. It holds the Chinese classical philosophers, the Vedanta commentators, jurists such as Maimonides and Al-Ghazali, and the founders of the Japanese Buddhist schools. What gathers them is partly what they lack: no tradition represented here calls them prophet, priest or king. That makes the shelf a residue as much as a category, so a place on it should be read as a statement about the kind of authority a figure held, not as a claim that any two of them are comparable.