The single best surviving eyewitness account of how the Elect and Hearers actually related to one another comes from Augustine of Hippo, who belonged to the Manichaean community as a Hearer for roughly nine years before his conversion to Catholic Christianity, and who later wrote at length, and critically, about the sect from the inside. Augustine describes bringing food to the Elect, financially supporting the community, and observing the Elect's rituals without ever crossing into their rank himself, since he continued, by his own later admission, to keep a concubine and to hold ordinary secular ambitions the Elect's vows would have forbidden entirely. His account, preserved mainly in the Confessions and in his later anti-Manichaean polemical works, is hostile in its final verdict but is also the most detailed description to survive of the Elect from someone who spent years watching them at close range rather than at a doctrinal or geographic distance.
The relationship between the two ranks was reciprocal rather than simply hierarchical: Hearers gained religious merit specifically through their service to the Elect, feeding them, housing them, and funding the community, in a system that gave lay Manichaeans a clear route to spiritual credit without requiring them to keep the Elect's far harsher vows themselves. This structure, an ascetic core supported by and dependent on a much larger and much less restricted lay body, has invited comparison to Buddhist monastic and lay relationships, though Manichaeism developed its own version independently, out of its own light-and-matter cosmology rather than by direct borrowing.