The word and what it claims
Samādhi is the eighth limb of Patañjali's *Yoga Sūtras* — absorption, the final stage of meditative practice in which the apparent separation between the meditator, the object of meditation and the act of meditation collapses into a single state. Mahā-samādhi — great absorption — names the moment at which the practitioner, at a time of their own choosing, settles into the samādhi state and does not return: the body is left behind voluntarily and finally, the consciousness does not re-enter the ordinary waking field, and what was the practitioner is held to merge into the absolute the practice was directed at. The framing borrows the deliberate, conscious vocabulary of the Yoga Sūtras and applies it to the act of dying itself. The claim is that the trained yogi's death is structurally different in kind from the ordinary involuntary dimming of awareness: ordinary death is the dissolution of the body around an unprepared mind; mahā-samādhi is the deliberate exit of a prepared mind from a body it no longer requires.
How it is reported in the index
Paramahansa Yogananda's *Autobiography of a Yogi* is the index's most extensive treatment of the framing, both as account and as object. The book describes the mahā-samādhis of Lahiri Mahasaya in 1895 and of Sri Yukteswar in 1936 in considerable detail, including Sri Yukteswar's reported reappearance to Yogananda three months after the cremation — an episode written as straight reportage and presented as evidence for the kriyā-yoga lineage's claim about what advanced practice eventually permits. Yogananda's own death in March 1952, after a banquet honouring the Indian ambassador to the United States, was framed by his organisation as mahā-samādhi in the same lineage usage; the notarised letter from the Forest Lawn embalmer describing an unusual absence of decomposition in the days following has been cited by the Self-Realization Fellowship as confirmation and treated more cautiously by external observers. The contestation is part of the topic.
Sadhguru returns to the framing in several teachings — both regarding his own intention concerning his eventual exit and concerning the conscious-death tradition of the yogis he was trained inside — and treats mahā-samādhi as the natural culmination of the haṭha-yoga and kriyā curriculum rather than as a separate technique. The framing is recognisable in another vocabulary in Ram Dass's account of his teacher Neem Karoli Baba's departure on 11 September 1973 in Vrindavan, treated by his Western and Indian disciples as a mahā-samādhi in the same lineage sense, and in the Maharaji story the encounter with a teacher whose departure is held in advance to be voluntary is one of the operative pieces of the narrative.
What it isn't
Mahā-samādhi is not coterminous with *nirvāṇa* or *mokṣa* — those terms name the recognition that the practice is held to permit, mahā-samādhi names a specific moment at which the recognition is held to become final. The recognition can in principle be available to a jīvanmukta — a liberated-while-living practitioner — for many years before the mahā-samādhi; the mahā-samādhi is the bodily exit, not the liberating event. The framing is also not universal across the traditions the lexicon covers. Buddhist traditions do not use the term: what the Vajrayāna lineages call parinirvāṇa (the Buddha's own final exit) and the Tibetan tukdam (the meditative absorption held to occur in the days following an advanced practitioner's death) are structurally related but differently framed and differently theorised. The Christian contemplative tradition has no exact equivalent and would resist the framing on the basis that the agency in question is not the practitioner's. And the mahā-samādhi claim is also empirically contested: the reported features — voluntary timing, full awareness at the moment of exit, occasional physical signs in the days following — are difficult to verify in principle and have been rigorously verified in no case. By way of comparison, Nisargadatta Maharaj's *I Am That* — the dialogues of a teacher who died of throat cancer in 1981 — makes no claim that the teacher's own exit will be of any particular kind, and his lineage did not adopt the mahā-samādhi framing for the event. The term remains useful for what it points at, which is a tradition's own framing of what a life of advanced practice eventually permits; treating that framing as established fact is a separate matter.
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