The seer, the seeing, and the seen — and then only the seen, shining.
The Eighth Limb
Samadhi is where the ladder ends, and where language begins to fail on schedule. Patanjali's definition (III.3): meditation becomes samadhi when the object alone shines forth, as if awareness were empty of its own form — artha matra nirbhasam svarupa shunyam iva. In Dhyana a subtle watcher still attends the unbroken flow; in samadhi the watcher is gone. Not unconscious — the opposite. Awareness has become so completely the object that nothing is left over to stand apart and observe. The seer, the seeing, and the seen collapse into one event.
The word compounds sam (together), a (toward), and dha (to place): a placing-together, a complete collection. What has been collected is everything that was scattered — the whole system of attention gathered into a single point until the point opens.
The Gradations
Samadhi is not one state but a graded series, and the Sutras' first chapter maps it with taxonomic care. Samprajnata samadhi — absorption with support — still holds an object, and refines through stages: with gross thought (vitarka), with subtle thought (vichara), with bliss (ananda), with bare I-am-ness (asmita). Beyond it lies asamprajnata, absorption without support, where even the object is released. The deepest distinction is between sabija (with seed) and nirbija (seedless) samadhi: as long as a seed of latent impression remains, the meditator returns to ordinary mind and the cycle continues; nirbija samadhi burns the seeds. That final, objectless, seedless absorption shades into kaivalya, the aloneness of pure consciousness that is the Sutras' stated goal — the definitive answer to the text's opening definition of yoga as the stilling of the mind's fluctuations, for here they are stilled at the root.
Place in the Sequence
Samadhi completes samyama, the inner triad begun in Dharana and deepened in Dhyana — three depths of one gathering. Every tradition that runs this experiment reports the summit in its own dialect: the jhanas and cessation of Buddhism, the nirvikalpa realization of Vedanta where atman is known as Brahman, the unitive states catalogued by mystics East and West. Whether these are one summit or several is a live question in the study of Meditation and consciousness. What the eight limbs assert is more modest and more radical: that the state is not a gift or an accident but the lawful result of a method — begin with Yama, and the path leads here.
Related
- Eight Limbs of Yoga — the sequence this completes
- Dhyana — the previous limb, the unbroken flow
- Yama — where the path begins
- Meditation — the practice whose far end this is
- Vedanta — the realization in philosophical dress
- Buddhism — the parallel map of absorption
- Yoga — the parent overview