The extraction of Light imposed an extremely demanding discipline, and Manichaeism solved the problem by dividing its membership in two.
The Elect kept the full rule. They took the three seals (of the mouth, governing speech and diet; of the hands, governing action; and of the breast, governing sexual desire), and the effect was near-total renunciation. They ate no meat, drank no wine, owned almost nothing, did not marry or reproduce, and did not farm or harvest, because cutting a plant injured the Light within it. They travelled, taught, and copied books. Their central function was ritual: eating a vegetarian meal, prepared for them by others, in which the digestive process of a purified body released the Light bound in the food and returned it upward. The Elect were, in a precise sense, the apparatus of salvation.
The Hearers supported them. They worked, married, held property and ate ordinary food, and they were bound by a much lighter rule, including regular fasting, almsgiving, prayer and honesty. Their principal religious act was providing food to the Elect, which transferred merit and placed them in line for rebirth as one of the Elect in a future life. Manichaeism accepted transmigration, which supplied the mechanism by which the Hearer's slower path could eventually converge with the faster one.
Augustine was a Hearer for around nine years before his conversion to Catholic Christianity, and his later anti-Manichaean writings are among the fullest accounts of the religion by anyone who had been inside it. They are also polemical, and they were long the main source available, which distorted the picture until the primary texts began to be recovered.
The liturgical year centred on the Bema, a spring festival commemorating Mani's death, at which an empty raised seat represented his continuing presence as teacher, and which included communal confession. Confession was frequent and formalised, on the reasoning that unavoidable daily harm to the Light required regular acknowledgement.
The system had an internal difficulty its opponents pressed hard. If reproduction imprisons Light, a religion of the Elect alone cannot continue, and Manichaeism depended structurally on a laity doing what its own theology described as harmful. Augustine made much of this, and it is a genuine tension rather than a slander.