Manichaean teaching is organised with unusual clarity, and Mani intended it to be. He held that earlier revelations had failed because their founders wrote nothing down, so he composed his own scriptures, in his own hand, and had them illustrated.
The framework is two principles and three moments. The two principles are Light and Darkness, co-eternal and utterly distinct, neither derived from the other. This is a full dualism, not the qualified kind in which evil is a privation or a permitted test; matter is not neutral and darkness is not the absence of anything.
The three moments are past, present and future. In the past, the two realms are separate, Light in the north and Darkness in the south, each complete in itself. Darkness, becoming aware of the Light, attacks it. In the present, the Father of Greatness responds through a series of emanations, and in the course of the war particles of Light are swallowed by Darkness and mixed into it. The material cosmos is then constructed, by the Living Spirit, out of the defeated powers of Darkness, as a machine for extracting the trapped Light: the sun and moon are vessels, the waxing and waning of the moon is the light being ferried upward, and the Milky Way is part of the route. Human beings were produced by the powers of Darkness precisely in order to keep Light imprisoned in bodies and to propagate that imprisonment through reproduction. In the future, the extraction completes, the cosmos burns, Darkness is sealed away permanently, and the separation of the beginning is restored.
Salvation in this scheme is metallurgical rather than judicial. Nothing is forgiven; something is refined out. The saving knowledge is the recognition by the individual of which part of himself is Light.
Mani presented himself as the seal of a sequence of messengers that included the Buddha, Zoroaster and Jesus, each sent to a particular region and each of whose teaching had subsequently been corrupted. This was a deliberate design for a universal religion, and it is why the same system could be presented in Christian terms in the Roman Empire, in Zoroastrian terms in Iran and in Buddhist terms in China without the core being changed.