What is method, within the context of the unity of method and wisdom? It is a dedicated heart of bodhichitta, based on love and compassion. It apprehends its object, enlightenment, with the intention to achieve it in order to benefit others. Compassion, as its basis, apprehends its object, the suffering of others, with the wish to remove it.
Wisdom, on the other hand, is a correct view that understands voidness--the absence of fantasized, impossible ways of existing. Even if it is aimed at the same object as method, it apprehends that object as not existing in an impossible way.
The ways wisdom and compassion each apprehend their object are not at all the same. Therefore, we need to actualize these two, as method and wisdom, first separately and then together.
Even if we speak about the mahamudra* that is method and wisdom, inseparable by nature in the ultimate tantric sense, the first stage for its realization is understanding the abiding nature of reality.
--from The Gelug/Kagyu Tradition of Mahamudra by H.H. the Dalai Lama and Alexander Berzin, published by Snow Lion Publications
