In practice, merit-making centres on the relationship between the lay community and the monastic order. Laypeople give food to monks on their morning alms round, support monasteries, sponsor ordinations, fund the building and repair of temples and images, and offer robes at the annual kathina ceremony after the rains retreat. The monastic community, by preserving and embodying the discipline and the teaching, is regarded as a "field of merit" in which such gifts bear the richest fruit, and the exchange, material support flowing to the monks, merit and teaching flowing to the laity, sustains Buddhist society.
A distinctive and important feature is the transfer or sharing of merit: the merit generated by a good deed can be dedicated to others, most commonly to deceased relatives, so that they may benefit from it. This practice, prominent at funerals and memorials, knits the living and the dead into the moral economy of merit and answers the natural wish to help those who have died. Scholars note that it sits in some tension with the strict doctrine that each being reaps only its own karma, a tension the tradition has reconciled in various ways.