Samatha (calm abiding)

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.

Shamatha is the Sanskrit name, and the form used across the Tibetan and East Asian Mahayana traditions, for the meditation of calm abiding, the cultivation of a stable, settled attention resting one-pointedly on its object. It is the counterpart, under a different transliteration, of the practice the southern Buddhist tradition calls samatha, and it names the same fundamental training: the gathering of a scattered mind into steadiness. In the Tibetan presentations it is very often taught as the foundation of the whole meditative path, the ground that must be laid before the more advanced practices of insight and of tantra can bear fruit.

The object of shamatha may be the breath, a small object or image placed before the meditator, a visualised form of a buddha, or simply the bare presence of awareness itself. As the mind is repeatedly returned to its object, agitation and dullness, the two great obstacles, are gradually overcome, and the attention becomes clear, stable and pliant.

The relation between calm and insight is one of the classic questions of Buddhist practice, and the traditions weight it differently. The mainstream position treats calm abiding as the indispensable foundation on which insight is built: a concentrated mind sees clearly, an agitated one does not, and so the meditator first develops some measure of stability and then turns that stabilised attention to the examination of impermanence, unsatisfactoriness and not-self. Some traditions cultivate the deep absorptions fully before beginning insight work; others hold that a lighter, workable concentration, "access concentration", suffices to begin.

Calm abiding is not unique to Buddhism; concentration on a single object is common to the Indian meditative traditions, and the Buddhist jhanas have close counterparts in the classical yoga of Patanjali. What is distinctively Buddhist is the refusal to treat the absorptions as the goal. However deep the calm, the tradition insists it is a tool, and that only the insight it enables cuts the roots of suffering.

The Tibetan tradition sets out the development of shamatha in a detailed map of nine progressive stages, from the first effortful placing of the mind through increasing continuity to a final effortless resting in which attention remains on its object without strain. This graded scheme, illustrated in a well-known allegorical painting of a monk pursuing an elephant that grows steadily tamer, gives the practitioner a diagnostic ladder against which to measure progress and to identify the faults of dullness and excitement at each level.

In the Mahayana and Vajrayana, shamatha is rarely an end in itself. It is cultivated as the stable platform for vipashyana, the analytical insight into emptiness that the greater vehicle regards as liberating, and, in the tantric context, for the demanding visualisation and completion-stage practices that require a mind trained to remain vividly and stably absorbed. The complementary pairing of calm and insight, of shamatha and vipashyana, runs through the whole of Buddhist meditation as its organising structure.