Samādhi Is Inevitable
Tahn Pamutto, November 12, 2025
Q: At one point you said Samādhi is inevitable. It may mean a bunch more lives ahead for some of us, but it is inevitable. Could you expound on that because it was a very comforting, positive thing to hear.
A: Well, that’s the primary thing… the “bunch more lives” is the optional part. Samādhi is inevitable given enough time and given that you apply yourself to it. Samādhi is not as skill-based as it might seem.
Mindfulness, it’s function in Samādhi… sometimes it’s presented that we’re doing ‘mindfulness meditation’, like mindfulness and Samādhi are the same thing. For many people there’s no separation between mindfulness and meditation… you need mindfulness to meditate. But actually Sati and Samādhi are two different things.
Sati, mindfulness, requires skill. It’s intentionally choosing to remember something. When you choose to remember something, you bring that knowledge into a given moment. Usually we’re taking at face value whatever we see, smell, hear, taste, touch, and we’re dealing with it as it is. But when we have sati, we are remembering some outside piece of information. We have context. It’s not just what we’re feeling; it’s not just the thing in front of us. We’re remembering, “Oh, this is just a body, or “All things are impermanent,” or “the Four Noble Truths”. We’re keeping that knowledge as part of our decision-making process. And that’s the part that’s skill-based.
We use mindfulness to shear off the hindrances. The hindrances are based on ignorance. Mindfulness is specifically used to choose out of the hindrances.
When we attain the first stage of enlightenment, ignorance diminishes. It continues diminishing until the point of enlightenment. Ignorance can’t perpetuate itself. That’s what the first stage of enlightenment is: you have broken through ignorance. You’re no longer ignorant of the Four Noble Truths.
So because ignorance is getting progressively weaker (at the maximum, over seven more lifetimes), the fuel for the hindrances is getting weaker. If you let this process go on long enough there won’t be enough ignorance for the hindrances. You will be able to get Samādhi even without any skill.
Because you won’t need the mindfulness to not have the hindrances.
This is what the Buddha experienced as a seven-year-old boy. It was the harvest festival. He was up on a hill overlooking all the people working really hard down below. And he was just enjoying himself.
He was content, he was well fed, he was happy. He had no skill yet — he had not been taught meditation. But at that time he had no hindrances. And because of all that, he went into the first jhāna.
This is the inevitability of Samādhi.
You’re trying, you’re working on it, you’re developing, and you’re leveraging what you have learned of mindfulness in this current life. So you’re trying to get it early. You’re not just waiting to see if it comes on its own by accident. You’re trying to cultivate the conditions for it. If you’re not yet successful for whatever reason, eventually there just simply won’t be any hindrances. And it will just be a matter of time until at some point you are relaxed, content and happy enough. Then Samādhi will arise just by virtue of not having any hindrances.
The Abhidhamma is great at making Samādhi more technical. But Samādhi can also be very simple. The reality is that the mind can only be focused on one thing at a time. It seems otherwise because in successive mind moments the mind jumps around to different objects and different sense bases. Sometimes we have a mind in a state of seeking. That is because of the hindrances.
It’s not that the mind is inclined to settle if the hindrances are not present. It’s that the mind has no reason not to settle. It’s simply a matter of there being an object interesting enough for the mind to settle around. That’s why happiness, contentment, and relaxation are still necessary. The mind will not gain Samādhi with an object it doesn’t care about. But if it likes the object and there are no hindrances, Samādhi is inevitable.
This is why in meditation we practice applying the mind to something, to the point that it becomes interesting. The breath by itself is not interesting. But if you apply the mind to it enough, then you see its qualities, you see its interesting facets, and then it becomes much easier for the mind to settle on it and concentrate with the breath as an object.
Sometimes the mind is fascinated with something and we kind of want it to not be, but there’s this really interesting problem and we keep thinking about it. When I was younger, I would sometimes dabble in strategy games and I’d play chess for a while until I got to the point where I’d close my eyes and see little chess pieces moving around… it would get maddening. I’d say, “I need to stop this. I don’t want this to be happening.” It wasn’t unwholesome. It’s just that the mind was interested in it. It wasn’t based on sense desire: it was just based on habit. An interesting object the mind would go back to on its own.
This is what we’re working with when we try to cultivate Samādhi. We’re actually using that capability of the mind which allows us to choose the object, to develop interest in an object. If we have something like a problem at work, a very complicated and nuanced problem that involves other people and responsibilities, it’s going to keep our mind a little diffuse. It’s too busy.
Whereas if it’s something really straightforward like paying attention to a body part or paying attention to the breath or paying attention to loving-kindness… the thinking, the attention that we give to the object makes the object more interesting.
If the object is too complex, we’re going to be circling around it and the object is not going to have the ability to get interesting enough for us to get into Samadhi with that as an object. I never got into jhana from thinking of chess problems – too complex. Too theoretical. Not solid enough. But if we stay with one simple and clear object and we develop it, then Samādhi will arise.
In the Pali Canon you have so many people get enlightened while hearing the Dhamma. They’re sitting next to the Buddha listening to a Dhamma talk. They’re not thinking about anything else. The Buddha was very good at speaking. He was tall, he was very handsome, he had a melodious voice. He had the best radio voice you could ever hope for. He just captivated people and they would listen for hours.
But he wasn’t talking just to have people listen to him. He was continuously directing their minds toward truth. As people were focused and hanging on his every word, they were in Samādhi. They were in Access Concentration based on listening to the Dhamma. And many of them, it seems, attained stream-entry or later stages of enlightenment, based on just the focus it takes to intently listen to the Dhamma.
One of the inevitabilities of practicing Dhamma is that when you’ve had at least that moment of faith and moment of understanding — when you experience the point of becoming a Faith follower or a Dhamma follower — you will inevitably develop more wholesome activities, more wholesome things to focus on. This is usually because of hearing the Dhamma.
Part of “ignorance” is ignorance of the consequences of our actions. We delude ourselves into thinking we won’t get bad consequences from doing certain things. That’s something that falls away very, very quickly. It’s not that the bad habits fall away very quickly; sometimes it takes a lot of work to shed certain habits. But the belief that the habit is a good thing is immediately dispelled. A person who drinks might think, “I’m going to regret this tomorrow.” But they still do it, right? There can be that little disconnect between knowledge and actions. But when a Faith or Dhamma followers does the bad things, they will know they’re bad things and that they will get unwanted, undesirable consequences from doing them. There’s at least that amount of mindfulness.
When you have that you can trust that even if you are extremely lazy in your practice you can’t help but eventually develop. You can’t help but eventually reach the state of full enlightenment because you just don’t have the delusion to fail to distinguish between wholesome and unwholesome states. And even if you’re really foolish, you’re going to eventually incline towards wholesome states. Just because they feel better.
Delusion makes us think that if we say something angry at somebody, it feels pleasant. Delusion says ‘What feels good is good.’ So we keep doing it. “Wow, it feels so great to yell at somebody when I’m really angry. It’s very cathartic.” But once you reach that point of wisdom, you’ll see, “Wow, that’s always going to give me bad consequences to do that.” We start restraining those actions, and we start to realize that regardless of how it feels in the moment, it’s bad overall.
When you know something is bad overall at the very least you don’t cultivate it. You don’t get better at it. You don’t develop a 12-step plan of how to get better at yelling at people and insulting them and arguing with them. You don’t become better at embezzling funds from the company you work for.
You’ve stopped developing those kinds of activities. It’s not necessarily a given that you will start developing the wholesome activities, but you are definitely not going to be cultivating the bad ones. If you are cultivating anything, it will probably be a good thing, or at least a neutral thing.
If somebody has been at this for a while, cultivating wholesome activities for a couple of lifetimes, they just seem like they’ve got it so easy. They just come into life and they just don’t have a lot of hindrances or a lot of desire. They sit in meditation and it seems to work for them. It’s pleasant. “Why?” you might think of them, “why not ME?” They’re just getting the results of having been at this for a while.
It shows that we live in a causal universe. If you’re not getting immediate results for your practice think of those people. You’re putting the conditions in for future success with or without effort.
There’s a special focus in the Theravada towards the paths and the fruits and towards the linear nature of the dhamma. Because we do want to reiterate that. On a day-to-day basis you might be wondering, “Am I going backwards? Am I getting worse? I look at my mind and there’s still defilements here after all of these years.” But what’s really happening is you’re getting more mindful and more sensitive to your defilements, whereas before you were completely ignorant of them. Now you know each one and you feel it very acutely when it pokes you. And you’re just so much more committed to getting rid of them, which is a good thing.
In a sutta to Mahanama, a Sakyan who became king after the Buddha’s father passed away, the Buddha gives a discourse on what lay people should cultivate. And he focuses on the six recollections: the recollection of the Buddha, the Dhamma, the Sangha, the recollection of caga (relinquishment or giving), on Sila, morality, and on Devas.
The first three, the recollection of the Buddha, the Dhamma, and the Sangha, are always good. They’re always worthwhile because they will cause growth in faith and wisdom, which are the qualities you need for stream entry. You need sufficient faith and wisdom and you need to be oriented towards the Dhamma. If you’re recollecting Buddha Dhamma Sangha, that’s what you’re cultivating.
The other three, recollecting on giving, sila, and recollecting on the devas, are kind of perfect for lay people because they deal with specifically what the biggest problem is: you have so many responsibilities, so many duties, so many things absorbing all of your time that you might not get a lot practice done in samsara just by virtue of having so much else to do. This is the world of chores, the human realm where we’re stuck washing clothes and cooking meals and all of these things. But if you reflect on giving, on sila, on the devas, you’re likely to be reborn in a better place. Specifically, the heavenly realms where you will have less chores. Even the recollections are structured to deal with your biggest obstacles – both in the short term and in the long term.
Half of these recollections are generally dealing with the path and half are dealing with the specific obstacle that that would cause you to potentially be reborn as a human again the next time. If you are reborn here on Earth there is no situation where it’s not a bummer. Don’t do it. It’s a terrible idea. It’s a terrible investment and it’s getting worse every day. Do those three reflections and go somewhere better. Because you’ve already been doing the first three, the Buddha, Dhamma, and Sangha. So if you land somewhere better where life is more comfortable, your progress will be slower for sure, because you’ll have a lot less inspiration to immediately get out of samsara. But it will be much more pleasant.
This all folds back into the realization that there is very little safety to be found in samsara except for those who attain to the path. This is why we reflect on the paths and fruits so much in the Theravada. The moment you attain to the path you have a kind of safety that can’t be bought. This is why we call it a refuge. Because once you attain to the path — you can’t be sure where you will end up, but you can be sure that things will progressively get better to the point that you get out.