Categorization of paths and people here is for convenience only. I intend absolutely no value judgements.
If a "path" is excluded, then either it hasn't occurred to me to include it or I'm unaware of its existence altogether.
Chances are high that I'll be misinformed about something somewhere along the way. By all means tell me if this happens.
Because a path is included or excluded has absolutely nothing to do with its importance relative to other paths or with whether or not I agree with that belief system.
The summaries attached to a path or person are only meant to be the briefest of descriptions. I'm not well read enough to dare write any more of a description and why do so when other people have already done it so well? I provide links to quality sites so that viewers can get the lowdown from those who are much better informed than I or even from the original source itself.
Paths and people under the different categories are under alphabetical order.
The distinction between monotheist, polytheist, or non-theist seems to have a very large gray area in many belief systems. First, the concept of a higher being manifests itself in different words - god, deity, spirit, celestial being, etc. Second, how independent a separate higher being is from the supreme being seems very unclear in many cases. Please keep this in mind if you think I mislabel a belief system as monothesist, polytheist or non-theist. I'm learnig as I go along.
We mustn't forget that the historical origin of a belief system is more often than not radically different from the belief system as we know it today. It might be said that the Gautama Buddha was not a "Buddhist", that Lao Tzu was not a "Taoist", that Jesus was not a "Christian." (The example of Jesus comes from what very little I've heard of the historical Christ. Someone please tell me if I'm mistaken.)
The distinction "East" and "West" doesn't sit well with me, but I can't come up with anything more descriptive than that. The distinction (at this website, at least) has nothing to do with which is more logical, rational, spiritual, etc. In my experience, ethnocentric pride and myopic vision have reared their ugly heads in putting up artificial barriers, dividing the world in half - The logical, rational, philosophical "West" and the mystical, spiritual "East".
Words such as philosophy, spirituality, religion, etc. have so much overlap that I hope we can avoid the semantic hair splitting of which system of inquiry is "philosophical" and which isn't, what constitutes a religion and what doesn't, ad nauseam.