Samayika is a central practice of Jainism, a period of meditative equanimity in which the practitioner withdraws from all harmful activity to sit in calm, balanced awareness for a fixed time, traditionally about forty-eight minutes. The word derives from a term for equanimity or evenness of mind, and this state of undisturbed balance, free of attachment and aversion, of the pull toward the pleasant and the push against the unpleasant, is precisely what the practice cultivates. During samayika the practitioner renounces sinful acts, sits in stillness, and turns the mind to reflection, self-examination, the recitation of sacred verses and meditation, resolving for the duration to treat all beings with the same friendliness and to regard gain and loss, pleasure and pain, with an even mind.
Samayika is one of the practices in which the lives of the Jain layperson and the mendicant most nearly meet. For the ascetic, equanimity is a permanent state; for the layperson, samayika is a temporary entry into that same state, a period of living, for its duration, as an ascetic does. It is counted among the essential duties of the observant Jain and among the disciplinary vows a layperson may take up.