Patanjali names it in the second sentence of his text, then spends four chapters circling it without ever quite landing.
Samadhi is the eighth and final limb of yoga. It is the state the whole system points toward. It is also the thing the tradition finds hardest to say anything useful about, and every classical description works by subtraction. Not this. Not that. Not what you are currently picturing.
The difficulty is not evasion. It follows directly from what the state is claimed to be.
Why It Resists Description
“Tad eva arthamatra-nirbhasam svarupa-shunyam iva samadhih.”
— Yoga Sutra 3.3
Ordinary experience has a shape. Someone perceiving. Something perceived. The act joining them. Every sentence in every language assumes that structure.
Samadhi is described as the collapse of it.
Patanjali defines it in sutra 3.3 as the condition in which the object alone shines forth, and the awareness attending to it becomes as though empty of its own form. Something is still happening. Nobody is standing apart from it any more, watching it happen.
Which leaves language stuck. Description needs an observer. The state being described is one where the observer has stopped being separate.
Where It Sits
Samadhi is not a technique. It is what the three preceding limbs produce, and those three work as one process.
Dharana is concentration. Attention placed on a single point and brought back each time it drifts. The bringing back is the practice.
Dhyana is meditation. It is what happens when the drift stops. Attention becomes continuous, a flow toward the object rather than a series of recoveries.
Samadhi is when even the sense of attending disappears, and only the object remains.
The three together are called samyama. Patanjali treats them as one graduated process, not three separate achievements. You do not practise dharana on Monday and reach samadhi on Friday. One deepens into the next.
Not One State but Several
The classical texts distinguish grades, and the distinctions matter, because people regularly mistake an early stage for the end.
The broad division is between samprajnata samadhi, absorption that still has an object supporting it, and asamprajnata samadhi, absorption without one.
Within the first, sutra 1.17 describes a progression.
| Stage | What supports the absorption |
| Savitarka | A gross object, with words and associations still attached |
| Nirvitarka | The same object, with words and memory fallen away |
| Savichara | A subtle object, still within time and space |
| Nirvichara | The subtle object, free of those references |
| Sananda | Marked by joy |
| Sasmita | Only a bare sense of being remains |
Beyond these sits nirbija samadhi, seedless absorption, where no object supports the state at all.
The seed metaphor is precise. An object leaves an impression. Impressions germinate into future mental activity. Remove the seed and nothing gets planted.
The fourth chapter names one further state, dharmamegha samadhi, the cloud of virtue, which precedes kaivalya, liberation.
The Difference Between This and Feeling Good
Meditation reliably produces pleasant states. Calm. Spaciousness. Absorption in a task. Occasional euphoria.
None of these is samadhi in Patanjali’s sense, and the tradition is unusually blunt about the confusion.
Two of the graded stages, sananda and sasmita, involve joy and a refined sense of self. Both are explicitly intermediate. A practitioner who arrives at either and concludes they have finished has stopped in the middle.
The third chapter makes it worse. It catalogues siddhis, powers said to arise from samyama applied to various objects. Knowledge of past and future. Understanding the speech of animals. Invisibility. Extraordinary strength.
Having spent a chapter on them, Patanjali says plainly that they are accomplishments from the standpoint of ordinary awareness and obstacles from the standpoint of absorption.
A text that describes superpowers and then tells you they are in the way is a text that knows its readers will be tempted.
What It Is Not
Three states get mistaken for it, and the texts rule out all three.
It is not sleep. Sleep is a mental state with its own content. Patanjali lists it as one of the five kinds of mental activity that yoga stills, not as an example of stillness.
It is not trance. A trance narrows awareness. Samadhi is described as awareness without a separate observer, which is a different thing entirely.
It is not blankness. Something is still present. The object of absorption remains. What drops away is the sense of somebody standing outside it, looking on.
How Anyone Gets There
The method appears early, in sutras 1.12 to 1.16, and it has two parts.
Abhyasa is sustained practice. Patanjali defines it as effort maintained over a long time, without interruption, and with sincerity. All three conditions are specified. Intermittent enthusiasm does not qualify.
Vairagya is non-attachment. The progressive loosening of craving toward what has been experienced and what has been heard about.
The two work against each other productively. Practice without non-attachment becomes another form of acquisition, a person collecting states. Non-attachment without practice becomes passivity.
Sutra 1.20 adds what is needed by those without natural aptitude. Faith, energy, memory, absorption and discernment. A fairly ordinary list, which is somewhat reassuring.
Two Traditions, One Map
Patanjali was not working alone.
The Buddhist tradition had developed its own detailed account of meditative absorption, the jhanas, several centuries earlier. The Pali canon that records them was committed to writing around 29 BCE, describing material considerably older. It describes a comparable progression, moving from states involving thought and examination toward states where both fall away.
The overlaps are close enough that scholars have argued about the direction of influence for a long time without settling it.
What the parallel establishes is that these were not private claims made by one school. Multiple Indian traditions, working separately and disagreeing about almost everything else, produced convergent maps of the same territory.
Is It Permanent?
Not in Patanjali’s account, and this surprises people.
Samadhi arises and passes. Sutra 1.18 describes the residue left behind afterwards, and the whole architecture of practice assumes repetition rather than a single arrival.
Kaivalya, the goal of the fourth chapter, is different. It is the final settling of consciousness in its own nature, with the mental field no longer generating the disturbance that obscured it.
The lake image the tradition uses is worth taking literally. Stilling the surface does not create the bottom. It removes the interference that was stopping you from seeing something already there. And the surface can be disturbed again tomorrow.
What This Means on a Mat
Almost none of this is likely to occur in a yoga class, and the classical texts would not expect it to.
But the framework does something useful for an ordinary practice. It names a direction. Concentration, then continuity, then absorption, with ethical conduct and physical steadiness holding it all up from underneath.
Most people will spend their entire practice inside dharana. Returning attention to a point. Losing it. Returning it again.
Patanjali does not call that failure. In his arrangement the returning is the sixth limb, and the sixth limb is where the last three begin.
Samadhi: Common Questions
What is samadhi in yoga?
The eighth and final limb of Patanjali’s system. A state of absorption in which the distinction between the one attending and the object of attention falls away.
What is the difference between dhyana and samadhi?
Dhyana is unbroken attention flowing toward an object. Samadhi is when even the sense of attending disappears and only the object remains.
What is nirbija samadhi?
Seedless absorption, where no object supports the state. Without an object there is no impression left to generate future mental activity.
Is samadhi permanent?
Not in Patanjali’s account. It arises and passes. Kaivalya, liberation, is the separate and final outcome described in chapter four.
Are the siddhis part of samadhi?
They are described as arising from samyama, but Patanjali explicitly calls them obstacles from the standpoint of absorption.
How is samadhi reached?
Through abhyasa, sustained uninterrupted practice, and vairagya, progressive non-attachment, supported by the preceding seven limbs.
Sources consulted: Edwin Bryant, The Yoga Sutras of Patañjali (2009); Vyasa, Yoga Bhashya; B.K.S. Iyengar, Light on the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali (1993); Georg Feuerstein, The Yoga Tradition (1998).
Sources and further reading
Primary texts are linked in public-domain translations where one exists; modern scholarship is linked to the publisher.
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