Sakya Buddhism approaches the relationship between mind and emptiness as a non-dual unity in which analysis and direct experience converge. Drawing on Madhyamaka, it holds that the mind, like all phenomena, is empty of inherent existence, lacking any fixed, independent essence. Emptiness here is not a separate substance or a nihilistic void, but the very mode of being of mind itself. At the same time, mind is acknowledged conventionally as a stream of clarity and knowing, arising through causes and conditions. The luminous, knowing quality of mind is not denied; what is denied is that this clarity possesses an independent, unchanging self-nature. Thus, the mind’s clarity is how it appears, while emptiness is how it truly is, and these are not two different realities.

This understanding is cultivated through a synthesis of sutra and tantra. On the sutra side, careful reasoning and analytical meditation examine thoughts, emotions, and perceptions, revealing that every aspect of mind fails to exist inherently. The very mind that analyzes is itself discovered to be dependently arisen and empty, cutting through both the reification of mind as some permanent essence and the tendency to treat emptiness as sheer nothingness. Emptiness is described as a non-affirming negation, which simply denies inherent existence without positing some ultimate entity in its place, yet the realization of this emptiness is vivid and awake rather than blank or inert.

Tantric practice, especially in the Lamdré or “Path and Fruit” system, is then used to experientially confirm this unity of mind and emptiness. Deity yoga, subtle-body methods, and insight meditation are employed to recognize directly the inseparability of luminosity and emptiness in every moment of experience. The mind that appears with thoughts, images, and emotions is understood to be, from the very beginning, non-dual with the emptiness of those very appearances. Meditation thus proceeds without grasping at mind as truly existent and without treating emptiness as something apart from lived mental experience. In this way, the mind that seeks awakening and the emptiness it seeks to realize are seen as primordially unified, like two aspects of a single reality.