The eighth and last section of the path is samma-samadhi, right concentration or rapture.  Mental concentration is essential to samadhi, which is the opposite of those wandering desires often blamed as seeking for pleasure here and there.  But samadhi is more than mere concentration or even meditation and may be rendered by rapture or ecstasy, though like so many technical Buddhist terms it does not correspond exactly to any European word.  It takes in Buddhism the place occupied in other religions by prayer—­prayer, that is, in the sense of ecstatic communion with the divine being.  The sermon[485] which the Buddha preached to King Ajatasattu on the fruits of the life of a recluse gives an eloquent account of the joys of samadhi.  He describes how a monk[486] seats himself in the shade of a tree or in some mountain glen and then “keeping his body erect and his intelligence alert and intent” purifies his mind from all lust, ill-temper, sloth, fretfulness and perplexity.  When these are gone, he is like a man freed from jail or debt, gladness rises in his heart and he passes successively through four stages of meditation[487].  Then his whole mind and even his body is permeated with a feeling of purity and peace.  He concentrates his thoughts and is able to apply them to such great matters as he may select.  He may revel in the enjoyment of supernatural powers, for we cannot deny that the oldest documents which we possess credit the sage with miraculous gifts, though they attach little importance to them, or he may follow the train of thought which led the Buddha himself to enlightenment.  He thinks of his previous births and remembers them as clearly as a man who has been a long walk remembers at the end of the day the villages through which he has passed.  He thinks of the birth and deaths of other beings and sees them as plainly as a man on the top of a house sees the people moving in the streets below.  He realizes the full significance of the four truths and he understands the origin and cessation of the three great evils, love of pleasure, love of existence and ignorance.  And when he thus sees and knows, his heart is set free.  “And in him thus set free there arises the knowledge of his freedom and he knows that rebirth has been destroyed, the higher life has been led, what had to be done has been done.  He has no more to do with this life.  Just as if in a mountain fastness there were a pool of water, clear, translucent and serene and a man standing on the bank and with eyes to see should perceive the mussels and the shells, the gravel and pebbles and the shoals of fish as they move about or lie within it.”