Samatha, calm abiding or tranquillity, is the Buddhist meditation of concentration, the training of the mind to rest steadily on a single object without wavering. It is one of the two great wings of Buddhist meditation, paired with vipassana, insight; where insight examines experience, calm abiding stabilises the attention that insight requires. The object may be the breath, a coloured disc or other device, a quality such as loving-kindness, or a recollection; the classical manuals list forty such supports, matched to different temperaments. The practitioner places the mind on the chosen object and returns it there each time it strays, again and again, until it settles and stays of its own accord.
The developed states of calm abiding are the jhanas (in Pali) or dhyanas, a graded series of increasingly refined absorptions in which the coarser movements of mind fall away and the attention grows unified, luminous and pleasant. These states are prized but are not, in the Buddhist analysis, liberating in themselves; a mind can rest in deep absorption and rise from it unchanged. Their value is instrumental: they make the mind workable.