Dhyana in Buddhism in the context of "Bhavana"

Siddhartha Gautama, most commonly referred to as the Buddha (lit. 'the awakened one'), was a wandering ascetic and religious teacher who lived in South Asia during the 6th or 5th century BCE and founded Buddhism. According to Buddhist legends, he was born in Lumbini, in what is now Nepal, to royal parents of the Shakya clan, but renounced his home life to live as a wandering ascetic. After leading a life of mendicancy, asceticism, and meditation, he attained nirvana at Bodh Gaya in what is now India. The Buddha then wandered through the lower Indo-Gangetic Plain, teaching and building a monastic order (sangha). Buddhist tradition holds he died in Kushinagar and reached parinirvana ("final release from conditioned existence").

According to Buddhist tradition, the Buddha taught a Middle Way between sensual indulgence and severe asceticism, leading to freedom from ignorance, craving, rebirth, and suffering. His core teachings are summarised in the Four Noble Truths and the Noble Eightfold Path, a training of the mind that includes ethical training and kindness toward others, and meditative practices such as sense restraint, mindfulness, dhyana (meditation proper). Another key element of his teachings are the concepts of the five skandhas and dependent origination, describing how all dharmas (both mental states and concrete 'things') come into being, and cease to be, depending on other dharmas, lacking an existence on their own (svabhava).

Samatha (Pāli samatha Sanskrit: śamatha शमथ; Chinese: 止; pinyin: zhǐ), "calm," "serenity," "tranquility of awareness," and vipassanā (Pāli vipassanā; Sanskrit: vipaśyanā विपश्यना; Sinhala: විදර්ශනා), literally "special, super (vi-), seeing (-passanā)", are two qualities of the mind developed in tandem in Buddhist practice.

In the Pāli Canon and the Āgama these qualities are not specific practices, but elements of "a single path," and are "fulfilled" with the development (bhāvanā) of mindfulness (sati) and meditation (jhāna) and other path-factors. While jhāna has a central role in the Buddhist path, vipassanā is rarely mentioned separately, but is usually described along with samatha.