The conception of the sage as otherness (from another place and time) made this term the ideal candidate to translate the notion of sheng 聖 or shengren 聖人, which in ancient Chinese texts refers to a moral, sometimes also political, achievement of human being. Beneath this seemingly consensual ‘sage’, however, lie paradoxes, the greatest sage, Confucius, having made no claim to wisdom, and alternatives between closeness and distance, presence and absence, which are the source of radically different visions of the sage.