Samadhi · Pāli/Skt: samādhi

In the Cūḷavedalla Sutta (MN 44), Dhammadinna the nun tells Visakha the lay follower that the factors of the path fall into three aggregates, and that, in her words, “Right effort, right mindfulness, & right concentration come under the aggregate of concentration”, the second of the three trainings. Asked what concentration actually is, she answers: “Singleness of mind is concentration, friend Visakha; the four frames of reference are its themes.” Samādhi is the mind gathered into one, with mindfulness supplying what it rests on.

As right concentration (sammā-samādhi), the eighth factor of the Noble Eightfold Path, samādhi is defined in SN 45.8 as the four jhānas: from the first, with its “rapture & pleasure born from withdrawal, accompanied by directed thought & evaluation”, to the fourth, which is “purity of equanimity & mindfulness, neither pleasure nor pain”. The word is identical in Pāli and Sanskrit.

The term travelled with the tradition. Zen takes its name from the Chinese Chán, itself “a transliteration of the Sanskrit term dhyāna”, and the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy notes that “a deepened state of meditation, called samādhi”, was “singled out as one of the three components of study a Buddhist was required to master”, the other two being ethical precepts (sīla) and non-discriminatory wisdom (prajñā). In Zen accounts of deepening meditation, samādhi names the last of three stages, “the stage of absorption”, in which the split between the one who concentrates and the object concentrated on “will disappear and be replaced by a non-dualistic framework”.