Practice · SamādhiVolume FivePart I · Pāli RootsPaper 1 of 31

What Samādhi Actually Means

中文主題：三詞辨義

Author: Shi Huijing 釋慧鏡

Date: Spring 2026

Version: 1.0

ID: SAMADHI-P01

Abstract

Contemporary Western practitioners meet a single English umbrella — meditation, with its near-relatives mindfulness and concentration — where the early Buddhist analysis deployed a precise multi-term technical field. This paper, the opening chapter of the SAMĀDHI volume, prises apart three of the terms that the modern vocabulary and the Chinese translation idioms alike tend to press into one: samādhi (the mind's gathering, understood as a faculty — a genus), samatha (calm, understood as a method — a path of approach), and jhāna (absorption, understood as an attainment — a species). The argument runs in two opposed directions. The Chinese Āgama layer split a single Indic field into several words used side by side: in the Saṃyukta Āgama (T0099) the dominant renderings are zhèngshòu (正受, 249 occurrences), sānmèi (三昧, 222), and zhèngdìng (正定, 118), while shēmótā (奢摩他, samatha), pípóshènà (毘婆舍那, vipassanā), and the full disyllable chánnà (禪那, jhāna) appear zero times — a decisive datum for the datability of translation vocabulary. The Abhidharma layer then ran the opposite way, gathering the scattered words back onto a single defining referent, unification of mind upon one object (cittassa ekaggatā / 心一境性), in the Abhidharmakośa (T1558), the Prakaraṇapāda (T1542), the Cheng weishi lun (T1585), and the Abhidharmasamuccaya (T1605) — yet without flattening method and species back into the genus. The paper also makes one structural reservation explicit: the word chán (禪) in its later school sense — the Chan tradition's "concentration and wisdom are not two" — does not surface self-consciously in Chinese sources before the eighth century (T2837, T2007 / T2008, T2076), and is therefore held in reserve for Volume VII; in Parts I–VI, chán carries only its scripture-translation sense of jhāna as graded absorption. The chapter closes by seeding the volume thesis for chapter two (P02): the Buddha tasted his teachers' formless attainments and abandoned them — the deepest samādhi is one in which even the samādhi-state cannot be grasped.

I. Introduction

You arrive at a weekend retreat. Within the first hour you have collected three English words. The teacher uses mindfulness for what you are doing now — watching the breath, noticing when the mind wanders, coming back. Later the same teacher uses concentration for something that sounds like more of the same, only harder and steadier. And at lunch, in a lowered voice, someone mentions the jhānas — named as if they were a rare and slightly dangerous country that advanced practitioners disappear into for hours. By the end of the day you have arranged the three words on a single sliding scale: mindfulness is the everyday entry-level version of paying attention, concentration is the focused version, and jhāna is the deep end. One activity, three intensities.

This picture is almost universal in the contemporary Western reception of Buddhist meditation, and it is wrong in a specific and instructive way. The three words do not name three intensities of one activity. They name three different kinds of thing. Samādhi (the term behind "concentration") is a faculty — a capacity of mind. Samatha (the term sometimes left untranslated, sometimes rendered "calm" or "serenity") is a method — a way of working. Jhāna (the deep-end word) is an attainment — a specific, graded state. To file all three under "degrees of focus" is to confuse a capacity, a technique, and a destination, as though muscular strength, weight training, and a personal-best lift were three amounts of the same thing.

The modern conflation has a recognizable source. The word mindfulness, having travelled out of the monastery and into clinics, schools, and corporate wellness programmes, now does the work of an entire vocabulary. Pressed beneath that single signboard are at least four distinct Pāli technical terms — sati (mindfulness in the strict sense, the recollective awareness analyzed in the first volume of this series), samādhi (gathering), samatha (calm), and bhāvanā (cultivation, "meditation" in the broad sense). The compression is understandable as a pedagogical and commercial choice; it is not a defect of character in the people who teach this way. But as scholarship it cannot be followed. The first task of a volume on samādhi is to unstack the words.

The historical record offers an unexpectedly sharp instrument for doing so. Open the Saṃyukta Āgama (《雜阿含經》, T0099), the Chinese translation that scholars have long regarded as among the closest surviving witnesses to an early Saṃyutta-style collection, rendered by Guṇabhadra in the Liu-Song period. Search it for the words it uses when a meditator enters the states under discussion. The most frequent rendering is not the term a modern reader would predict. It is not chándìng (禪定) and not even sānmèi (三昧). It is zhèngshòu (正受) — 249 times. Sānmèi (三昧) is second, at 222; zhèngdìng (正定) third, at 118. And the three terms that today's Buddhist-studies vocabulary treats as standard — shēmótā (奢摩他, for samatha), pípóshènà (毘婆舍那, for vipassanā), and the full disyllabic chánnà (禪那, for jhāna) — occur, across the whole of this text, zero times.¹

That zero is the chapter's first piece of evidence, and it is more counter-intuitive than the retreat-room scene. It tells us that the polished "samatha / vipassanā / jhāna" vocabulary that Western practitioners now take as the bedrock terminology of Buddhist meditation was not yet in standard use when one of the oldest Chinese witnesses to the early discourses was made. That vocabulary is a later sediment. What lay beneath it, even at the level of translation, was already a field divided among several words. The modern compression of the field into "mindfulness" is the most recent layer in a much longer history of the same field being repeatedly re-cut.

This volume opens, then, by loosening a few words that have been pressed together:

Samādhi (定) is a faculty — the mind's gathering upon a single object: undistracted, unscattered, settled.
Samatha (止) is a method — calming as the means by which agitation is answered and the mind brought to rest; the approach through which samādhi is reached.
Jhāna (禪那) is an attainment — a particular graded state among the four absorptions and the four formless attainments.

These are not three names for one thing. They are three facets of one field: the name of a capacity, the name of a method, the name of a degree. In the grammar of the Pāli analysis, samādhi is the genus, jhāna is a species, and samatha is a method — and a genus, a species, and a method cannot be laid out as a flat list of synonyms.²

Drawing this distinction has a protective function for everything that follows. It marks the border between sati (念) and samādhi (定). The previous volume of this series gave a full functional account of sati as the recollective engine of practice; this volume must not, at its outset, quietly write samādhi back into sati. The two are neighbours — both appear among the seven factors of awakening, both among the five faculties — and in some discourses and some meditation objects they cooperate closely. But functionally they differ: sati is the ground of awareness, the bare recollective registering of what is present; samādhi is the inward unification built on that ground. There is an overlap zone. There is not an identity. "Mindfulness is not concentration" (念≠定) is a red line of this volume; any reading that collapses samādhi back into sati — including the common move of the modern mindfulness movement — is one this volume declines.

A second word must also be fenced off at the door: chán (禪). In the Chinese Buddhist vocabulary, this single character carries at least two non-synonymous uses. The first is the scripture-translation use, chán = chánnà (禪那) = jhāna: the graded-absorption sense. The second is the school use, the chán of the Chan tradition (and its Japanese descendant, which English usually calls by its Japanese name) — the "living concentration" of concentration and wisdom are not two, within appearances yet free of appearances. The first sense belongs to the Pāli-roots and Abhidharma strata that occupy the first half of this volume. The second is a downstream development in the history of Chinese Buddhism, and this volume reserves it for Volume VII. Until then, wherever chán appears, it carries only the scripture-translation sense of absorption; wherever the Chan school's distinctive claims are at issue, they are deferred.

None of this is etymological housekeeping for its own sake. It is what allows the volume's central question to stand up: when we say someone is cultivating samādhi, what exactly are we saying? That a faculty is being trained? That a method is being practised? That a state is being reached? Each has its own canonical and doctrinal grounding, and conflating them produces avoidable disputes — including the modern dispute over whether the jhānas are "necessary," which often turns out to be two parties using one word for three different things.

A simple image of water can close this opening. The arising of samādhi is usually not a matter of adding something to the mind but of subtracting agitation. When water grows still, the moon was already there at its bottom; nothing was added to produce the reflection — only the disturbance was removed. That subtraction is the first verb of everything that follows in the study of samādhi.³

II. The Three Pāli Terms — Samādhi, Samatha, Jhāna

In Pāli usage samādhi is not a lone word but the centre of a cluster of mutually checking terms. Its most frequently cited definition appears in the Cūḷavedalla-sutta (Majjhima Nikāya 44), where the layman Visākha asks the nun Dhammadinnā what samādhi is, and she answers with a phrase that becomes the anchor of the entire later tradition: samādhi is cittassa ekaggatā — the one-pointedness, or unification, of the mind.⁴ This anchor — "unification of mind upon one object" — would become the shared skeleton on which every later Abhidharma school built its definition of samādhi (see §IV below). It names the mind's non-scattering, non-agitation, non-running-off in relation to a single object. Note what it does and does not say: it is the mind's unity upon an object, not the mind's blankness; it is gathering, not suppression.

Samatha (Chinese zhǐ 止, or transliterated shēmótā 奢摩他) stands, in Pāli usage, alongside vipassanā (insight, 觀), the two together forming the so-called twin track of calm and insight. (The relationship of these two as full paths of practice is a problem this volume takes up in later chapters and in conversation with the eightfold-path material; here only the term is being fixed.) Samatha is not a synonym for samādhi. It is the method or approach by which samādhi is reached — calming as the answer to scatter and restlessness, the settling of the mind. In the Aṅguttara Nikāya's Twos, calm and insight are listed as the pair of "things that partake of true knowledge" (vijjābhāgiya): the one conducing to liberation of mind (cetovimutti), the other to liberation by wisdom (paññāvimutti).⁵ But samatha here is still a term at the level of method, not the state itself.

Jhāna (Chinese chánnà 禪那, or jìnglǜ 靜慮) is the name for samādhi as it is realized, under the method of samatha, into a specific graded attainment — the four jhānas and the four formless attainments, eight stages in all. The standard description of the four jhānas occurs in the Mahāsatipaṭṭhāna-sutta (Dīgha Nikāya 22) and is repeated at Satipaṭṭhāna-sutta (Majjhima Nikāya 10). In paraphrase of the canonical formula:

Secluded from sensual pleasures and from unwholesome states, a practitioner enters and dwells in the first jhāna, which has applied and sustained attention (vitakka, vicāra) and the rapture and ease (pīti, sukha) born of seclusion. With the stilling of applied and sustained attention, there is inner clarity and unification of mind, and one enters and dwells in the second jhāna, which has the rapture and ease born of samādhi, without applied and sustained attention. With the fading of rapture one enters the third jhāna; and with the abandoning of pleasure and pain, in the purity of equanimity and mindfulness, one enters and dwells in the fourth jhāna.⁶

The decisive feature of this passage is not the internal structure of each jhāna — that is the proper subject of chapter four (P04) of this volume — but the fact that the formula appears precisely as the definition of right concentration (sammā-samādhi). When the Buddha teaches the eighth factor of the noble eightfold path, the content of "right samādhi" is given directly as the four jhānas. Here, in a single passage, jhāna and sammā-samādhi are tied to one anchor.

The interrelation of the three terms can now be stated cleanly:

Samādhi is the genus — the mind's capacity for non-scattered gathering upon an object as such. It can be shallow or deep, can pervade every wholesome state, and can also refer narrowly to deep unification.
Samatha is the method — the calming approach toward samādhi, paired with vipassanā as the insight approach.
Jhāna is the species — samādhi, under the method of samatha, realized at a determinate degree of absorption, named accordingly.

To lay the three side by side as synonyms is to press the genus, the species, and the method into one undifferentiated heap. In the history of Chinese transmission that pressing did, in fact, happen — but it happened in a particular and traceable way, which is the matter of the next section.

One methodological note closes this section. The Pāli passages cited here (MN 44, AN 2.31, the jhāna pericope of DN 22) have received differing degrees of critical-edition scrutiny. Throughout this volume, citations of Pāli discourses are paired with their Chinese Āgama parallels where these exist, so that the same practice can be read along both traditions' trajectories; the conventions of this dual-track citation were set out in the opening apparatus of an earlier volume and are not repeated here.⁷

III. How Chinese Splits — A Single Indic Field Falls into Several Words

Return to the figures with which the chapter opened. In the Saṃyukta Āgama (T0099, Guṇabhadra, Liu-Song), zhèngshòu (正受) occurs 249 times, sānmèi (三昧) 222 times, zhèngdìng (正定) 118 times; shēmótā, pípóshènà, and the full chánnà occur zero times.¹ These numbers can carry a single claim: the Chinese Āgama layer had already, at the outset, broken a single Indic field into a terrain of several words used in parallel — and the "samatha / jhāna" vocabulary stratum so familiar to later readers had not yet appeared at this level.

Take zhèngshòu (正受) first. The word has long been read as an alternative rendering of zhèngdìng (正定, "right concentration"), but its coverage is in fact wider. It carries both samādhi (concentration itself) and samāpatti (the act of entering, the attainment of, a meditative state). This is why the four-jhāna passage in fascicle 17 of the Saṃyukta Āgama reads "at the time of the zhèngshòu of the first jhāna… at the time of the zhèngshòu of the fourth jhāna…" — not a loose translation but a precise framing of "the state of having entered the nth jhāna" as zhèngshòu.⁸ To read zhèngshòu uniformly as a synonym of zhèngdìng loses the entering-the-attainment half of its meaning. This is the first philological caution of the volume: zhèngshòu is not flatly samādhi.

Next, sānmèi (三昧). This is a transliteration — a Chinese phonetic rendering of a Prakrit form of samādhi — and it is the most widespread and earliest-circulating of the renderings, which is also why it is the most easily over-generalized. Sānmèi can serve as the proper name of a particular state (as in "the samādhi of emptiness," "the samādhi of signlessness") and equally as a general word for concentration ("to cultivate sānmèi," "to dwell in sānmèi"). Its semantic feel is closest to Pāli samādhi itself: it can name the general capacity of one-pointedness, and it can name a particularized meditative state.

Third, zhèngdìng (正定). This corresponds precisely to Pāli sammā-samādhi, the eighth factor of the noble eightfold path. Where Guṇabhadra uses it, he tends to use it within structural, normative enumerations — the eightfold path, the thirty-seven factors of awakening — where it occupies a fixed, regulatory slot.

What, then, does the zero count for shēmótā, pípóshènà, and full chánnà mean? It means that these three transliterated terms entered the mainstream of Chinese Buddhist vocabulary as standard technical terms later — roughly in step with the translation of the sectarian Abhidharma treatises and, afterward, with the formation of the Tiantai calm-and-insight (zhǐguān 止觀) system. When Guṇabhadra translated the Saṃyukta Āgama, the "samatha / vipassanā / jhāna" triad had not yet been fixed as a standard set; he worked with the earlier menu of choices — sānmèi, zhèngshòu, zhèngdìng, and chán (the single character, mostly in compounds such as chándìng 禪定 and chánsī 禪思, not the full disyllabic chánnà with its determinate-absorption sense).

This gives the volume a small methodological tool: Chinese Buddhist vocabulary can be stratified and dated. The "concentration vocabulary" a reader meets across different treatises and different eras of translation is not a set of interchangeable slices of one stable glossary; it is an accumulation of different lexical strata laid down at different historical moments. The same samādhi is rendered in the Āgama layer as zhèngshòu / sānmèi / zhèngdìng; in the Abhidharma treatise layer (the Abhidharmakośa, the Cheng weishi lun, the Abhidharmasamuccaya) it is gathered under dìng (定), sānmódì (三摩地), and děngchí (等持) and redefined under a single rubric; in the Madhyamaka and Yogācāra Mahāyāna treatise layer the twin-track vocabulary of shēmótā / pípóshènà and the perfection of dhyāna is added; and in the Tiantai line the comprehensive frame of zhǐguān (calm-and-insight) is added again. Each layer has its own history of translation and its own history of doctrine.

One further reader's safeguard belongs here. Do not rush to read the phrase wúsuǒyǒu (無所有, "nothing-whatever") as wúsuǒyǒu-chù (無所有處, the third of the four formless attainments, ākiñcaññāyatana), nor equate it with the third member of the three liberations (emptiness, signlessness, undirected). Wúsuǒyǒu occurs some 71 times in the Saṃyukta Āgama; some occurrences are indeed the name of the third formless attainment (a meditative degree), while others sit in the slot of the three liberations, corresponding to appaṇihita (rendered elsewhere as "wishless" or "undirected"). The distributive passage in fascicle 3 does string together emptiness / signlessness / nothing-whatever, but the clean, lexically uniform compound triad "emptiness / signlessness / wishless" does not occur as a fixed unit in T0099 — the triad appears distributively, not as a uniform lexical block. Reading such passages requires confirming, case by case, what each instance denotes.⁹

With this stratification made plain, the next section — the convergence in the Abhidharma layer — shows its force.

IV. How the Abhidharma Re-gathers — Samādhi Recollected as "Unification of Mind"

If the Chinese Āgama layer displays the splitting of a single Indic field, the Abhidharma treatise layer displays the opposite motion: the many parallel words are gathered back onto one unifying, definitional referent — the unification of mind upon a single object (cittassa ekaggatā / 心一境性).

The most direct evidence is in the Abhidharmakośa (《阿毘達磨俱舍論》, T1558, translated by Xuanzang). In fascicle 4, expounding the universal mental factors, it states that sānmódì (samādhi) is the unification of the mind upon a single object.¹⁰ Two things here repay a pause. First, sānmódì (三摩地, the new transliteration of samādhi) has been adopted as the headword term in place of the older sānmèi — a fruit of the new-translation drive toward precision. Second, "unification of mind upon one object" lifts the definition cleanly out of the multi-word terrain and condenses it into a single phrase. The same definition recurs in the Cheng weishi lun (《成唯識論》, T1585, Xuanzang), fascicle 5, which defines concentration as having, with respect to the contemplated object, the nature of focusing the mind without scattering, and serving as the support of wisdom;¹¹ and in the Abhidharmasamuccaya (《大乘阿毘達磨集論》, T1605), fascicle 1, which defines samādhi as having one-pointedness of mind upon the contemplated matter as its essence, and the support of wisdom as its function.¹²

Three treatises, three systems — the Sarvāstivāda, the Yogācāra, and the Abhidharmasamuccaya lineage — agree on the definitional skeleton of samādhi: the mind's one-pointedness, non-scattering, focus upon its object.

But if the matter stopped there, the real claim of the Abhidharma layer would be missed. Its truly striking force lies in its gathering of three distinct words — "calming," "even-holding," and "unification of mind" — onto a single chain. The strongest single piece of evidence is the definition of the faculty of concentration (samādhindriya) in the Prakaraṇapāda (《阿毘達磨品類足論》, T1542), fascicle 8:

What is the faculty of concentration? It is, with respect to the wholesome states arising from renunciation and seclusion, the mind's abiding, even abiding, close abiding, settled abiding, non-scattering, non-distraction, calming (攝止), even-holding (等持, samādhi), and unification of mind upon one object (心一境性): this is called the faculty of concentration.¹³

This passage lays "calming" (shèzhǐ), "even-holding" (děngchí), and "unification of mind" (xīn-yī-jìng-xìng) side by side as synonyms of the faculty of concentration — a single chain binding together terms from different lexical strata and declaring that they point to one and the same referent. The splitting performed by Chinese translation is here gathered back, by paraphrastic chaining, in the treatise layer.

But gathering is not flattening. Though the Abhidharma schools share a definitional skeleton for samādhi, they diverge on its ontological placement:

The Sarvāstivāda (the Abhidharmakośa tradition) files samādhi among the universal mental factors (mahābhūmika, 大地法) — those present in every state of mind whatsoever, wholesome, unwholesome, or neutral, concentrated or scattered alike. On this reading, samādhi is a pervasive quality of mind, not the proper name of a meditative state.
The Yogācāra / Abhidharmasamuccaya line (the Cheng weishi lun, the Samuccaya) files samādhi among the object-specific mental factors (別境, caitta arising only on particular objects) — present only when a specific contemplated object is before the mind, abiding only in relation to that object, not pervading every state. On this reading, samādhi lies much closer to the modern general sense of "focusing on an object."

That one and the same word should have its ontological status placed differently by two systems is itself a piece of evidence: "concentration" is not a small word. It carries enough doctrinal load in the Abhidharma analysis of mental factors that distinct schools contend over its position. That contention later enters the Chinese discourse on mind and consciousness, bifurcating into a "concentration pervades all states of mind" reading and a "concentration arises only on a meditative object" reading.

More worth noticing still: although the Abhidharma layer gathers "concentration / even-holding / unification of mind" onto one chain, it does not also pull the practice-discourse of "calm-and-insight" or the state-discourse of "jhāna" into that chain. In the treatise layer, three lines of exposition remain distinct: first, unification of mind is the definition of concentration; second, calm-and-insight is treated separately as a matter of practice approach; third, jhāna is given its own structural analysis as a determinate degree (its constituent factors, the five hindrances, and so on). The three narrative lines are not pressed into one.

In other words: the treatise layer supplied a unified definition for "concentration" (the genus) while preserving "calm" (the method) and "jhāna" (the species) as independent topics. The three-layer distinction set out in §II still holds in the Abhidharma layer — the layer simply furnished one of the three, the genus, with precise content: unification of mind upon a single object.

The chapter's opening thesis is thus shown to be two-directional. The Chinese Āgama layer splits the field into a terrain of parallel words; the Abhidharma treatise layer gathers it into a single definition, while preserving the three-layer distinction. Between §II and this section, the chapter has now laid out a complete topographical map of the vocabulary: from the three Pāli terms, to the several Chinese words, to the treatise layer's single definition that nevertheless keeps the three layers intact.

V. Translation History and the Reserve of the Word Chán

Push the map one notch later, into the history of the translated names themselves.

The most concentrated single source for the provenance of the concentration-vocabulary is the Fānyì míngyì jí (《翻譯名義集》, T2131), compiled by the Southern Song monk Fǎyún. In treating four key terms — sānmèi, sānmódì, chánnà, and shēmótā — Fǎyún lays out the old and new renderings side by side:

Sānmèi (三昧, old transliteration of samādhi): glossed as "well-ordered concentration," also called "right concentration" (正定), also called "right reception" (正受) — that is, the three renderings sānmèi, zhèngdìng, and zhèngshòu set out as synonymous alternatives.
Sānmódì (三摩地, new transliteration of samādhi): glossed as děngchí (等持) — the mind's even, balanced holding-of and resting-on its object.
Chánnà (禪那, transliteration of jhāna / dhyāna): glossed as jìnglǜ (靜慮, "quiet consideration"), with the further note, citing the Treatise on the Great Perfection of Wisdom, that the old rendering was sīwéixiū (思惟修, "cultivation by reflection") — and then the gloss "the quiet is concentration; the consideration is wisdom."
Shēmótā (奢摩他, transliteration of samatha): glossed simply as zhǐ (止, "calm").¹⁴

Read together, the four entries reveal an internal logic of the history of Chinese Buddhist vocabulary.

First, the old translations mixed transliteration with sense-translation — sānmèi (sound) used alongside zhèngdìng (sense) and zhèngshòu (sense); chánnà (sound) alongside sīwéixiū (sense). The translators preserved the Indic word's original shape with one hand while, with the other, supplying a sense-rendering for the comprehension of Chinese readers.

Second, the new translations (the Xuanzang line) drove toward precision — using děngchí (even-holding) to capture the root sam-ā-√dhā of samādhi (to hold, to place, to set in place), and jìnglǜ (quiet-consideration) to capture the dual sense of dhyāna (the quiet that is concentration; the considering that is the precising of thought). The new translations aimed to capture the morphemic structure of the Indic term in a single Chinese compound. Corpus statistics show the drive had real effect: in the Yogācārabhūmi (《瑜伽師地論》, T1579, Xuanzang) the term jìnglǜ occurs 812 times and děngchí 100 times; in the Abhidharmakośa (T1558, Xuanzang) jìnglǜ occurs 322 times and děngchí 45 times. The new-translation terms are overwhelmingly dominant across the Xuanzang corpus.

Third, the gloss "the quiet is concentration; the consideration is wisdom" — Fǎyún's small note on jìnglǜ — lays the dual sense of dhyāna (quiet = concentration / consideration = wisdom) side by side. This pairing already foreshadows the later tendency of Chinese Buddhism (especially Tiantai and Chan) to read "concentration and wisdom are not two" as a semantic structure internal to the very word jhāna. But it is only a foreshadowing. One cannot read back from it to conclude that jhāna carried a "concentration-and-wisdom-not-two" meaning already in the Pāli layer; that is a later overlay, and it must not be pre-dated.

Looking back from this map of translation history, the documentary support for the three layers named in §I comes into focus:

The genus (dìng 定 / sānmódì / děngchí) has its treatise-layer gathering (the Kośa, the Cheng weishi lun, the Samuccaya, the Prakaraṇapāda).
The method (zhǐ 止 / shēmótā) is an independent term, later, and not part of the mainstream Āgama layer.
The species (chánnà 禪那 / jìnglǜ / sīwéixiū) is the name for a determinate degree of absorption.

One word remains to be handled at the close of this section: chán (禪).

The difficulty of chán is that in the Chinese Buddhist vocabulary it carries at least two non-synonymous uses. The first is the scripture-translation use, chán as the abbreviation of chánnà (禪那), denoting the determinate absorption of jhāna — the Pāli-roots use, and the only sense in which Parts I through IV of this volume employ the character. The second is the school use, chán as the "living concentration" of the Chan tradition: concentration and wisdom are not two, within appearances yet free of appearances — a downstream development in the history of Chinese Buddhism.

Can the two senses be merged? Within the Chan tradition's own claims they are indeed deliberately merged — the Platform Sūtra's declaration that concentration and wisdom are one substance, not two is precisely such a merger.¹⁵ But the opening of this volume cannot take that merger as its starting point; to do so would swallow the three-layer distinction of §I whole at the first step.

More to the point, the self-conscious formation of chán as a school (the Chan tradition) can be dated. Among the documents that serve as anchors:

The Record of the Masters and Disciples of the Laṅkāvatāra (《楞伽師資記》, T2837), compiled by Jìngjué around 713, surviving in Dunhuang manuscripts. This text establishes a patriarchal lineage running Guṇabhadra–Bodhidharma–Sengcan–Daoxin–Hongren–Shenxiu, and contains the formula "single-practice samādhi: the very mind that recollects the Buddha is the Buddha."
The southern-school movement of Shenhui (from roughly the 730s), with its critique of the northern school, which pushed the dispute between "sudden awakening" and "gradual cultivation" onto centre stage.
The Platform Sūtra (the Dunhuang recension T2007, and the later received recension T2008), composed between the late eighth and the ninth century, which raises "concentration and wisdom are not two" to the status of a self-identifying doctrinal hallmark of the Chan school.
The Records of the Transmission of the Lamp of the Jingde Era (《景德傳燈錄》, T2076), completed in 1004, the comprehensive lamp-history of the Chan lineage.

That is to say: the self-conscious emergence of chán as a school is a matter of the early-to-mid eighth century; the chán of the Chinese Buddhist texts before that point is, in every case, the scripture-translation abbreviation of chánnà, carrying no sectarian claim. This volume therefore makes a structural decision: the sectarian sense of chán is reserved for Volume VII, and the character chán in the first six Parts carries only the scripture-translation sense of determinate absorption.

A passing cross-volume thread may be noted in the same breath. The formula "single-practice samādhi: the very mind that recollects the Buddha is the Buddha," in the Record of the Masters and Disciples of the Laṅkāvatāra, and the "single-practice samādhi" of the Platform Sūtra, are the same term unfolded from different interpretive angles — the former reading it as "the mind that recollects the Buddha is itself the Buddha," with a faint bridge to the buddha-recollection field of the first volume of this series; the latter reading it as the "living concentration" of "constantly practising the straight mind in all postures and at all times." The many-facetedness of single-practice samādhi is merely flagged here, not developed — it returns in Volume VII.

VI. Conclusion — Three Voices in Dialogue, and the Tee-Up for P02

Having unfolded the distinction among the three terms, and having traced the two-directional movement of the vocabulary — the splitting of Chinese translation, the re-gathering of the Abhidharma — the chapter closes by setting a middle-way correction within a frame of dialogue.

Scholarship on samādhi offers several principal approaches worth engaging.

The first is Richard Shankman's detailed distinction, in The Experience of Samādhi, between the jhāna of the Pāli Nikāyas and the jhāna of the commentarial tradition.¹⁶ This is useful for the three-term distinction of §II: it reminds the reader that samādhi is not univocal even within the Theravāda tradition — the Nikāya-layer descriptions of jhāna and the later commentarial refinements differ in both intensity and breadth. Where this volume parts company with the approach is on horizon: Shankman's analysis works within Theravāda materials and does not reach the Chinese Śūraṅgama and Tiantai horizons that later chapters of this volume must take up. (As with all attributions in this section, the specific claims here are to be verified against the source before they are firmed up in print.)

The second is the body of work by Rupert Gethin and Lance Cousins, which places samādhi in its structural position within the eightfold path and the threefold training (ethics, concentration, wisdom — sīla, samādhi, paññā).¹⁷ This framing supplies the strongest foundation for this series' overall architecture: the series is ordered along the threefold-training spine — sīla (Volume III) → samādhi (the present volume) → paññā — and that ordering is continuous with the Gethin–Cousins reading. This volume does not re-argue the structural case for the threefold training (that belongs to the higher architecture of the series); it simply registers the framing as a premise it accepts.

The third is Robert Sharf's "The Rhetoric of Meditative Experience," which supplies a crucial guardrail: do not reify samādhi into an inner state that an experiencing subject "collects."¹⁸ Sharf's caution applies throughout this volume. The characteristic error into which the study of concentration most easily slides is to speak of "the jhāna-state" as a psychological object that can be entered, possessed, and displayed. In describing the four jhānas, the meditation objects, samādhi states, the sudden-versus-gradual dispute, and silent illumination and the huatou, this volume holds to that guardrail: it describes their doctrinal structure and historical strata, and does not turn into a register of "experiential reports of meditative states" or a "ladder of attainments."

Bringing the three cautions together, the chapter restates, before closing, three red lines of this volume:

First, mindfulness is not concentration (念≠定). This volume does not press samādhi back into sati. The previous volume gave a complete functional analysis of sati; this one treats samādhi from the outset as the inward unification built upon that ground. The two have an overlap zone (both appear among the seven factors of awakening, both among the five faculties), but functionally they are not reducible to each other. Any reading that talks samādhi back into sati — including the common reduction of the modern mindfulness movement — is one this volume declines.

Second, no meditation manual. This volume treats the doctrinal structure, historical stratification, and conceptual load of samādhi; it offers no operational instruction on posture, breathing, choice of object, or steps for entering absorption. Descriptions of meditative states are confined to their structural exposition (the first jhāna's departure from the five hindrances, the sequential dropping-away of the jhāna-factors, and the like); they do not become a "how to reach the first jhāna" register. Instruction in actual practice belongs to a different domain — the training in the three higher disciplines — not to the task of this research volume.

Third, no reduction of samādhi to mindfulness (in the movement sense). The modern mindfulness movement compresses many technical terms beneath one signboard; this is an educational trade-off and not to be scolded. But as scholarship, this volume refuses to follow the reduction. Samādhi, samatha, jhāna, and sati are distinct technical terms across the Pāli, Abhidharma, and Chinese layers alike; they are interrelated, but they cannot substitute for one another.

The last image is left to open the next chapter.

There is a celebrated narrative in the Pāli literature. The young Siddhattha, on the day of a ploughing festival before his renunciation, spontaneously and without instruction entered the first jhāna in the shade of a rose-apple tree; the memory of that boyhood, untaught samādhi he would later use as the clue to the path of awakening (Mahāsaccaka-sutta, Majjhima Nikāya 36). After his renunciation, he studied in turn under Āḷāra Kālāma and Uddaka Rāmaputta, mastering the formless attainments of "the sphere of nothingness" and "the sphere of neither-perception-nor-non-perception" — and abandoned them, on the grounds that these deep concentrations did not lead to liberation (Ariyapariyesanā-sutta, Majjhima Nikāya 26).¹⁹

This origin narrative is the textual base of the next chapter (P02). It draws the line of a thesis that runs through the whole volume: the Buddhist sammā-samādhi is not the formless absorption of the non-Buddhist teachers; the deepest samādhi is one in which even the samādhi-state cannot be grasped. This thesis will be recovered at the volume's end, where it is fastened to the Heart Sūtra's "ultimate nirvāṇa" and "supreme awakening."

But that is later. This chapter has done its work by loosening three words that had been pressed into one: concentration is a faculty, calm is a method, jhāna is a degree; Chinese translation split the field, the Abhidharma re-gathered it, and the word chán in its sectarian sense is held in reserve for Volume VII. The hand that distinguishes the three terms is open; the next chapter can begin.

Footnotes

Word-frequency counts are from a full-text search of Saṃyukta Āgama (《雜阿含經》, T0099, trans. Guṇabhadra), Taishō vol. 2, in the CBETA Electronic Tripiṭaka edition: zhèngshòu (正受) 249, sānmèi (三昧) 222, zhèngdìng (正定) 118; shēmótā (奢摩他), pípóshènà (毘婆舍那), and the full disyllable chánnà (禪那) each 0. Compounds of the single character chán (e.g. chándìng 禪定, chánsī 禪思) are counted separately and not unfolded in this note. ↩ ↩²
The three-layer distinction of genus / species / method is not newly proposed here; its grounding across the Pāli and Abhidharma layers is in the citations of §II and §IV. ↩
The water simile is a commonplace of the concentration literature; it is taken here only in the sense of "subtracting agitation, not adding effort." Specific scriptural loci and the systematic treatment of meditation similes belong to later chapters of this volume. ↩
Pāli source: Cūḷavedalla-sutta, Majjhima Nikāya 44, PTS M i 301 (yā cittassa ekaggatā ayaṃ samādhi). The Chinese parallel is in the Madhyama Āgama (《中阿含經》, T0026), fascicle 58, the discourse of the nun Dhammadinnā; that passage differs slightly in formulation from the Pāli, and this paper takes the Pāli definition as authoritative. (The Pāli phrase is given here as a term, not as a verbatim quotation; no Pāli blockquote is offered.) ↩
Pāli source: Aṅguttara Nikāya 2.31, PTS A i 100. The numbering of suttas in the Twos of the Aṅguttara differs slightly across critical editions; this paper follows the PTS division. AN 2.31 (the vijjābhāgiya pair of calm and insight) and AN 4.170 (the Yuganaddha-sutta) are two distinct discourses and should not be conflated. ↩
The Pāli of the four-jhāna pericope is widely attested — Dīgha Nikāya 22 (PTS D ii 290 ff., the jhāna passage at approximately D ii 313), Majjhima Nikāya 10 (PTS M i 55 ff.), and elsewhere — with a Chinese parallel in the Saṃyukta Āgama (T0099), fascicle 17, in its four-jhāna zhèngshòu passage. The English here is the author's paraphrase of the canonical formula, not a verbatim quotation of any received translation; readers who wish a published English rendering may consult Bhikkhu Sujato's SuttaCentral translation (CC0). ↩
The dual-track citation convention (Chinese T-number alongside Pāli PTS reference) is set out in full in the opening apparatus of the NIAN volume (P01) of this series. ↩
Saṃyukta Āgama, fascicle 17, Taishō vol. 2, T0099; the specific four-jhāna zhèngshòu pericope is the proper subject of chapter four (P04) of this volume and is not unfolded here. ↩
The ambiguity of wúsuǒyǒu (無所有), and the distributive — rather than lexically uniform — appearance of the "emptiness / signlessness / wishless (or undirected)" triad in the Saṃyukta Āgama, follow from a full-text search of T0099. The referent of each instance must be judged individually from its context and cannot be treated uniformly. ↩
Abhidharmakośa (《阿毘達磨俱舍論》), fascicle 4: "samādhi is the unification of the mind upon a single object," Taishō vol. 29, T1558, 0019a22. ↩
Cheng weishi lun (《成唯識論》), fascicle 5: "What is concentration? With respect to the contemplated object, it has the nature of focusing the mind without scattering, and the function of serving as the support of wisdom," Taishō vol. 31, T1585, 0028b25. ↩
Abhidharmasamuccaya (《大乘阿毘達磨集論》), fascicle 1: "What is samādhi? With respect to the contemplated matter, it has one-pointedness of mind as its essence, and the support of wisdom as its function," Taishō vol. 31, T1605, 0664b03. ↩
Prakaraṇapāda (《阿毘達磨品類足論》), fascicle 8, the definition of the faculty of concentration, where "calming" (攝止), "even-holding" (等持), and "unification of mind upon one object" (心一境性) are set side by side as synonyms of the faculty of concentration, Taishō vol. 26, T1542, 0723b19; compare also fascicle 1 (0693a19): "What is concentration? It is the unification of the mind upon a single object." ↩
Fānyì míngyì jí (《翻譯名義集》), the entries on sānmèi, sānmódì, chánnà, and shēmótā, compiled by Fǎyún, Southern Song, Taishō vol. 54, T2131. The precise fascicle number and CBETA line-locator are reserved for final collation; the wording cited here follows the strings retrieved by full-text CBETA search, with the exact fascicle reference to be verified before the volume's final edition. ↩
Platform Sūtra of the Sixth Patriarch (《六祖大師法寶壇經》), the "Concentration and Wisdom" section, "concentration and wisdom are one substance, not two," Taishō vol. 48, T2008. Cited here as a forward reference only; the principal treatment of the Chan doctrine that concentration and wisdom are not two belongs to Volume VII (Part VII) of this series. ↩
Richard Shankman, The Experience of Samādhi: An In-Depth Exploration of Buddhist Meditation (Shambhala, 2008). The attribution here is to be checked item by item against the precise chapters of the original. ↩
Rupert Gethin, The Foundations of Buddhism (Oxford University Press, 1998); related work by Lance Cousins is scattered across the Journal of the Pali Text Society and other venues. Attributions to be checked item by item. ↩
Robert H. Sharf, "Buddhist Modernism and the Rhetoric of Meditative Experience," Numen 42 (1995): 228–283. The precise target of the attribution to be checked against the original. ↩
Pāli sources: Mahāsaccaka-sutta, Majjhima Nikāya 36 (the recollection of the boyhood first jhāna beneath the rose-apple tree); Ariyapariyesanā-sutta, Majjhima Nikāya 26 (the study under the two teachers and the abandoning of the formless attainments). The Chinese parallels are the relevant discourses of the Madhyama Āgama (《中阿含經》, T0026); the specific passages are the proper subject of the next chapter (P02). ↩

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