The fifteen karmadana, forbidden livelihoods, are listed in the lay conduct manuals and their effect on the community's economic history is direct. The list bars: burning charcoal; felling and dealing in timber; carting and transport using animals; quarrying, ploughing and other earth-digging trades; trade in ivory, animal products, lac, alcohol, poison and weapons; operating mills and presses that crush; castrating and branding animals; setting fires; draining ponds and reservoirs; and keeping animals that destroy others, such as hunting cats. Rule out all of that and what remains available is trade, brokerage, finance, jewellery, textiles and the professions — which is precisely the Jain occupational profile in India and abroad. This is a rare, clean case of a religious rule producing a durable economic sociology: the community's concentration in commerce and its subsequent wealth is not incidental to the ethic but generated by it. Jain writers make the point themselves, sometimes with discomfort about where the resulting capital has been invested.