The Clear Light Mind and the Web of Interdependence: A View from the Gelugpa Tradition

In the Gelug school of Tibetan Buddhism, realization doesn’t happen through belief. It happens through refined analysis and direct meditative absorption. The path is structured, deliberate, and precise. But at its core is something most people miss. The mind’s true nature is radiant clarity, and nothing exists independently—not even your thoughts.

Je Tsongkhapa, founder of the Gelug lineage, wrote:

“All phenomena are empty of inherent existence, yet they function. From this union, freedom arises.”

That’s the union we work with. Clear light and interdependence. The clear light nature of mind is not a metaphor. It is a subtle, luminous awareness untouched by conditioning. It’s there before your name, before your trauma, before even the feeling of I am.

In the Great Treatise on the Stages of the Path to Enlightenment, Tsongkhapa lays out the necessity of understanding dependent origination to reach this direct recognition. He writes:

“Because things arise dependent on causes and conditions, they lack inherent existence. Grasping at their independence is the root of suffering.”

Most modern seekers try to awaken without dismantling the belief in solidity. Solidity of objects, identities, emotions. But in the Gelug view, you cannot access clear light while holding to the illusion of separateness.

What appears to be “you” is a compounded designation. Five aggregates, momentary thoughts, fleeting perceptions—all dependent on causes, labels, and context. The mistake isn’t that the self appears. The mistake is believing that it exists from its own side.

Clear light mind is not something you attain. It’s what remains when the grasping dissolves.

In tantric practice, this becomes even more explicit. At the time of death, as the gross elements dissolve, the winds absorb into the central channel, revealing the most subtle mind—the innate clear light. That same mind can be accessed in this life through completion stage yoga.

But you don’t reach it by bypassing. You reach it through ethics, view, meditation, and stability. You stabilize the winds. You understand the illusion. You rest the mind on its own luminous clarity.

In The Essence of Eloquence, Tsongkhapa says:

“The understanding of emptiness is the king of views. But without dependent origination, it is incomplete. Only when these two are united is the path truly clear.”

This is why my work fuses breathwork and Buddhist view. Without grounding the body and calming the winds, the mind cannot settle. And without dismantling mistaken beliefs in independent existence, clarity will never be stable.

To know the clear light is to stop believing in separation. Not intellectually—but energetically.

The wisdom of the Gelugpa lineage is not dry philosophy. It’s the sharpest sword you can use to cut through illusion. But you must wield it. And you must look directly.

When the self is seen as a dependent phenomenon, not a solid identity, and the mind is rested in its natural luminous state, a new kind of freedom emerges. Not the freedom to escape. The freedom to remain, fully awake.