Confucius
Chinese philosopher, 551–479 BCE (Zhong-ni in the text below), and the figure the whole Neo-Confucian corner of this spoke descends from. He arrives here late and sideways — through doctrine-of-the-mean, a text about a phrase of his — which is a fact about how this corpus grew, not about his importance.
The phrase is Analects 6:29: "The virtue embodied in the doctrine of the Mean is of the highest order. But it has long been rare among people" (Burton Watson tr.). The Analects never explains it. [[doctrine-of-the-mean|Zhongyong]], attributed to his grandson zisi, is the text that does, and it puts further sayings in his mouth — "The respectable person embodies the course of the Mean; the average person acts contrary to the course of the Mean" — so some readers have attributed the whole text to him.
What this page rests on. One T2 tertiary source about a single text (doctrine-of-the-mean). The spoke holds no source on the Analects, on his life, or on classical Confucianism as a system — which is now the clearest gap in the non-Western corner: the tradition's Song revival (zhu-xi, wang-yangming) is paged in more depth than its founder.