Buddhist meditation has two complementary halves, usually grown together.
Samatha is calm abiding, the cultivation of stillness: gathering the scattered mind onto a single object until it settles and grows quiet. It is the Buddhist name for what yoga calls chitta vritti nirodhah, the stilling of the mind's fluctuations.
Vipassana is insight, clear seeing: once the water is still, looking into it, into the three marks of impermanence, unsatisfactoriness, and no-self.
Stillness makes seeing possible; seeing is what stillness is for. In this framework the two are trained as concentration (Dharana) and as inquiry in meditation (Dhyana).
How calm is built — the five marks of śamatha
Calm abiding is not a single switch but a sequence, and the tradition is unusually specific about its stages. Śamatha has five characteristics, and they arrive in order, each growing out of the one before.
- Stable attention — samādhi, attention that rests on its object without strain.
- Mindfulness — sati, the clear, bare knowing of what is present, moment to moment.
- Joy — pīti, a gladness that arises on its own once attention settles.
- Tranquility — passadhi, that joy maturing into a quiet, settled ease.
- Equanimity — upekkhā, the even, unshaken balance that tranquility ripens into.
The order is the teaching: you work with stable attention and mindfulness until joy emerges; joy matures into tranquility; and equanimity arises out of that. The two halves grow together for the same reason: attention and mindfulness build calm, calm makes insight possible; and the two together are what the tradition means by awakening.
Sati, mindfulness, is the same bare, non-judging knowing that the whole Mind priority trains: not thinking about experience, but knowing it as it happens. And the last two marks are old friends. Upekkhā and pīti are the equanimity and joy met among the Brahmaviharas, here turned inward, the same qualities ripening in stillness rather than reaching toward others.