This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Mani was born around 216 CE in Babylonia, into a family of Parthian aristocratic descent, and spent his early years within a religious community his family already belonged to before breaking from it in his mid-twenties. What followed was a period of teaching and travel that carried him as far as India, spreading a message he presented as a new and final revelation rather than a reform of any single existing faith.
The teaching he brought back to Persia set out a systematic dualist cosmology, light and darkness held in permanent cosmic struggle, a framework broad enough to absorb elements of Zoroastrianism, Christianity and Buddhism into one account rather than compete narrowly against any one of them. It was this reach across traditions, as much as the content of the teaching itself, that let Mani's faith travel as widely as it eventually did.
Returning to Persia from his travels, Mani won the protection of the newly crowned Sasanian king Shapur I around 241 to 242 CE. Royal favor lasted roughly three decades, spanning nearly the whole of Shapur I's own long reign, and gave Mani and the missionaries he trained the security to preach openly across the Persian heartland under a patron powerful enough to shield a new and foreign sounding faith from the established Zoroastrian priesthood that would later turn against it once that protection ended.
What Shapur I's patronage changed for Manichaeism's spread was survival past a single traveling teacher's own lifetime, three decades of protection at the highest level of Persian political power gave a new dualist faith time to root itself and train its own missionaries before the power that had sheltered it passed to a less friendly successor.