Jain ethical life is structured around five fundamental restraints, ahimsa or nonviolence, satya or truthfulness, asteya or not stealing, brahmacharya or chastity, and aparigraha or non attachment to possessions, and the tradition asks two different intensities of commitment to the same five principles depending on whether a person has taken up the mendicant life or remains a householder. Jain monks and nuns take these as mahavratas, great vows, observed absolutely and without qualification, extending nonviolence for instance to avoiding harm to even the smallest and least visible forms of life through practices such as straining drinking water and sweeping the path ahead of one's feet. The anuvratas are the lesser vows built from the same five principles but scaled to what a life still embedded in family, work, trade and property can sustain, permitting a layperson to observe nonviolence, truthfulness, honesty, marital fidelity and limited possession without the near total renunciation the mendicant vow demands.
The distinction is not read within Jainism as a lesser and a greater path toward two different goals but as the same single path toward liberation from karma taken at two different speeds, the lay anuvratas understood as building the ethical foundation and karmic lightening from which a monastic vocation, should it come, would eventually rise.