What is the Twelve Level Cap in regards to Confucianism?
Confucianism Confucianism, also known as Ruism, is described as tradition, a philosophy, a religion, a humanistic or rationalistic religion, a way of governing, or simply a way of life. Confucianism developed from what was later called the Hundred Schools of Thought from the teachings of the Chinese philosopher Confucius (551–479 BCE), who considered himself a retransmitter of the values of the Zhou dynasty golden age of several centuries before. In the Han dynasty (206 BCE – 220 CE), Confucian approaches edged out the "proto-Taoist" Huang-Lao, as the official ideology while the emperors mixed both with the realist techniques of Legalism. The disintegration of the Han political order in the second century CE opened the way for the doctrines of Buddhism and Neo-Taoism, which offered spiritual explanations lacking in Confucianism.
Fengjian Fēngjiàn (封建) was a political ideology developed from Confucian and "Legalist" philosophers during the latter part of the Zhou dynasty of ancient China, its social structure forming a decentralized system of government based on four occupations, or "four categories of the people." The Zhou kings enfeoffed their fellow warriors and relatives, creating large domains of land. The Fengjian system they created allocated a region or piece of land to an individual, establishing him as the ruler of that region. These eventually rebelled against the Zhou Kings, and developed into their own kingdoms, thus ending the centralized rule of the Zhou dynasty. As a result, Chinese history from the Zhou or Chou dynasty (1046 BC–256 BC) to the Qin dynasty has been termed a feudal period by many Chinese historians, due to the custom of enfeoffment of land similar to that in Europe. But scholarship has suggested that fengjian otherwise lacks some of the fundamental aspects of feudalism.