“One can impute emptiness logically when an independent reality of the self or of other phenomena is sought and not found. One also experiences it directly through meditation when the mind abides without ideas of existence or non-existence or both or neither. Meditators experience emptiness as a kind of fullness.

Emptiness allows for the unimpeded radiance of intrinsic awareness. In the experiential sense, then, it is not only a lack of something, but also a quality of knowing, or pristine cognition, a luminous quality that is the actual nature of the mind that can be experienced once the veils of concepts and emotions have been cleared away.

This experience is often referred to as clear light or radiance and also as "compassion." It is not something other than emptiness, for without emptiness it could not occur. It is the radiance-awareness that is the primordially pure basis of all manifestation and perception, the buddha nature.

This very nature of mind was always already there and is never corrupted or damaged, but only covered up by confusion. As such, it is the basis of spiritual practice, and also the goal or result. Buddha is not found anywhere outside of the intrinsic state of one's own mind. In the traditional breakdown, then, of ground, path, and fruition, the ground is one's own true nature, the fruition is the discovery of that, and the path is whatever it takes to make the discovery.

Kongtrul describes the identity of ground (basis) and fruition when he says:

The basis of purification is the eternal, noncomposite realm of reality that fully permeates all beings as the buddha nature.”

Sarah Harding