Classical Jain lay ethics extends the five anuvratas into a fuller set of twelve vows, adding three guna vratas, supplementary vows that further restrict conduct, such as limiting travel and consumption to reduce incidental harm, and four shiksha vratas, disciplinary vows practicing meditation, periodic restraint and hospitality to mendicants, which together shape a layperson's life around minimising violence in the necessarily compromised business of eating, trading and working in the world.
The nonviolence vow has had the most visible cultural consequence: Jain lay communities have historically clustered in trades understood to minimise direct harm to living beings, such as commerce, banking, gem trading and other occupations distant from agriculture and animal husbandry, which unavoidably involve killing, and strict Jain vegetarianism, excluding root vegetables on the grounds that uprooting them kills the whole plant and disturbs soil organisms, follows directly from anuvrata reasoning about which harms a householder can and cannot avoid. The vows are typically taken formally before a mendicant teacher, and a layperson may progress through a sequence of eleven pratimas, stages of increasing renunciation, that mark advancing lay practice and can eventually lead, for those who choose it, toward full monastic ordination and the mahavratas the anuvratas were always understood to anticipate.