The Sacred Books of the East is the reason his name is still in circulation. Beginning in 1879 and running to fifty volumes, it put translations of Hindu, Buddhist, Jain, Zoroastrian, Confucian, Taoist and Islamic scripture into English under one editorial scheme, with introductions, and made it possible for a reader with no oriental languages to compare them.
The scale required organisation rather than genius. Muller recruited the translators, among them Rhys Davids for the Pali texts, James Legge for the Chinese and Julius Eggeling for the Brahmanas, argued with Oxford University Press about money, and edited to a deadline for twenty years. Before it, a general reader in English had the Bible, a translation of the Quran and fragments. After it, the raw material for comparison existed in one place, and it is still cited, because for several of those texts no better English version was made for a century.
He had already done the same job on a smaller scale for a single text. His edition of the Rig Veda with the commentary of Sayana, six volumes published between 1849 and 1874 with East India Company money, established the printed text that Vedic scholarship worked from. The series and the edition together are why he is remembered as the organiser of a field as much as a theorist within it, and the organising has lasted much better than the theory.