The fourfold sangha — monks, nuns, laymen, laywomen — is not a hierarchy with an ancillary support wing but a mutual dependency written into the rules. A mendicant may not cook, may not store food overnight, may not carry money, may not own more than a whisk, a bowl and, for Svetambaras, robes, and may not accept anything prepared for them. They must therefore eat from lay households daily or not eat. Laypeople, conversely, have in feeding and lodging mendicants the most direct religious act available to them, and the merit is substantial. The arrangement has two effects worth noting. It keeps the mendicant order poor and unendowed — there is no Jain equivalent of monastic landholding on the scale seen elsewhere, because the rules forbid it — and it keeps mendicants continuously visible and accountable to the laity, since a community that stops feeding a monk has an immediate and unanswerable sanction. Jain laywomen in particular carry a great deal of this, since the alms round arrives at the kitchen, and scholars of Jain practice have argued that it is a genuine source of religious standing for them.