Before Confucius, the term Ru already named a recognized occupational group in the late Zhou dynasty, roughly the sixth century BCE and earlier, made up of men trained in the classical rites, music, archery, charioteering, writing and arithmetic, the so called Six Arts, who hired themselves out to noble houses to conduct funerals, ancestral sacrifices and other ceremonies requiring technical ritual knowledge that ordinary aristocrats no longer possessed as the old feudal order weakened. Confucius, by his own account descended from a minor noble family fallen into modest circumstances, belonged to exactly this professional class, and much of his early teaching career consisted of instructing students in the same ritual and textual skills.
What set him apart, and what later tradition credits him with founding as a distinct current within the Ru, was his insistence that correct performance of ritual was worthless without the inner moral cultivation, above all ren, benevolence, that ritual was meant to express and train. Confucius reoriented an existing professional guild toward ethical self-cultivation and political philosophy without abandoning its original ritual expertise, and it is this fusion, technical mastery of rite and text bound to a program of moral character, that later ages came to call Confucianism, Rujia, the school of the Ru.