The culminating stage of disciplined contemplative absorption in classical yoga, where the distinction between the meditator and the object of meditation is said to dissolve.
Samadhi names the culminating stage of disciplined contemplative practice within Yoga Darshana, described in the Yoga Sutras as a state in which the ordinary distinction between the meditator, the act of meditating, and the object attended to increasingly dissolves into a single, unified absorption.
A careful reading of the source text shows that samadhi is not presented as a single uniform experience but as a graded sequence of increasingly refined stages, each subtler than the last, moving from absorption still accompanied by discursive thought toward states progressively emptied of that discursive activity altogether. This archive resists treating "samadhi" as naming one simple achievement; the text itself insists on considerable internal structure and progression.
This state is the specific technical goal toward which the earlier ethical and physical disciplines of the Yoga Sutras are oriented, and its achievement is closely tied to the liberation, moksha, the system as a whole is aimed at: the isolation of pure consciousness from the mental activity that had obscured it, described in this school's terms as the settling of the mind's fluctuations into stillness.
Samadhi does not arise from technique alone; the Yoga Sutras present it as depending on a cultivated dispassion, vairagya, toward the ordinary objects of craving and aversion that otherwise keep attention scattered. The two are described as working together: dispassion clears the ground that concentrated absorption can then occupy, and progress in each reinforces the other rather than one simply preceding the other in a fixed, one-directional sequence, which is part of why the text treats them as a paired discipline rather than as sequential, separable steps.
Because this term has migrated into popular usage as a loose synonym for any calm or blissful meditative feeling, this archive is careful to preserve its technical, graded, and goal-directed character as described in its source text, rather than letting it dissolve into a vague description of pleasant relaxation.
Because this term has traveled so widely into general spiritual vocabulary, it is worth returning deliberately to its specific technical definition within the system that first developed it in this detail. The Yoga Sutras present samadhi as the outcome of a long, disciplined sequence beginning with ethical restraint and passing through progressively subtler stages of concentration, not as a state that can be reached by a brief relaxation exercise or a single moment of calm. Reading the term against its own source text, rather than against its considerably looser modern popular usage, is essential to understanding what the tradition that coined it actually meant to describe.
Read Samadhi directly alongside the Yoga Sutras and Patanjali for its systematic textual source, and follow vairagya to see the dispassion this state depends on. The reading path the self and liberation situates this technical goal within the archive's wider treatment of disciplined release.
A compact, systematically structured text organizing the practice and philosophy of disciplined liberation into a sequence of clear, terse aphorisms.
Liberation or release, framed as the ultimate aim in several Indian traditions — with each defining what it means differently.
Cultivated dispassion toward craving and aversion, treated across several traditions as a necessary discipline for clear seeing rather than emotional withdrawal from life.
The traditional systematizer of yoga philosophy, credited with compiling the Yoga Sutras into a coherent path of disciplined liberation.
The philosophical school systematizing yoga as a disciplined path paired with Samkhya metaphysics, distinct from the broader family of practices covered under the general concept of yoga.