Diogenes is interesting to me because he prompts a fundamental question concerning the nature of virtue: Who/what would Diogenes be without the attention-seekin

Diogenes is interesting to me because he prompts a fundamental question concerning the nature of virtue: Who/what would Diogenes be without the attention-seeking behavior? In other words, take the virtuous behavior of Diogenes but remove all public interactions. A person content to wash wild onions outside of the public sphere that stays out of the public sphere. By definition, we can't count these people who are actually content to be virtuous "nobodies". We don't know who they are or if they in fact actually exist. Who or what is a moral Ramanujan without seeking an immoral Hardy? It's a question as ancient as Diogenes: Plato asked a variation on this question in the Republic with the Ring of Gyges which granted invisibility to its wearer: Is there anyone who would still act virtuously while being in fact accountable to no one? I have similar open-ended questions concerning the Buddha and Jesus Christ as found in the Gospel of Mark. Both the Buddha and Jesus are types of "re-wilded" humans that share more similarities with each other, classical Cynicism, Pyrrhonism, and Daoism than with most other philosophical systems. According to the Pali Canon, the Buddha only became a sammāsambuddha (viz. a teaching buddha) because of the request of Brahma to remember those on the cusp of enlightenment, otherwise he regarded teaching the Dhamma as an uphill battle not worth fighting: "This Dhamma that I have attained is deep, hard to see, hard to realize, peaceful, refined, beyond the scope of conjecture, subtle, to-be-experienced by the observant. But this generation delights in attachment, is excited by attachment, enjoys attachment. For a generation delighting in attachment, excited by attachment, enjoying attachment, this/that conditionality & dependent co-arising are hard to see. This state, too, is hard to see: the pacification of all fabrications, the relinquishing of all acquisitions, the ending of craving; dispassion; cessation; unbinding. And if I were to teach the Dhamma and if others would not understand me, that would be tiresome for me, troublesome for me.” (SN 6:1, tr. Thanissaro Bhikkhu). If he hadn't acceded to the request to teach, he would've become a paccekabuddha (viz. a buddha on one's own) and no one would've noticed anything except one of the Sakyan princes disappearing from worldly life. In a similar fashion, Jesus in the Gospel of Mark is portrayed frequently as trying to escape the notice of the public and preventing the knowledge of his "miraculous" works. It's an interesting question to think about (assuming a historical Jesus) what would Christianity look like if his patients had obeyed his injunctions to stay quiet and to just be grateful? Would it exist at all? Assuming that Jesus did in fact perform good works but he told every recipient to be quiet, how can we epistemologically know how many he actually performed? It all reminds me of Chapter 17 of the Daodejing: "The best of all rulers is but a shadowy presence to his subjects. Next comes the ruler they love and praise; Next comes one they fear; Next comes one with whom they take liberties. [...] "Hesitant, he does not utter words lightly. When his task is accomplished and his work done, the people all say, ‘It happened to us naturally ["no one intended this; we did it ourselves"].’ (tr. D.C. Lau)"