It doesn’t matter what our practice is called: following the breath, shikan-taza, koan study; basically, we’re all working on the same issues: “Who are we? What is our life? Where did we come from? Where do we go?” It’s essential to living a whole human life that we have some insight.
I'm not convinced. We ultimately don't know what happens to us when we die, and we can live fulfilling lives anyway.
To take the analogy of the wave, from "The Heart of Buddha's Teaching", we know that the water that makes up the wave continues even once the wave breaks up on the shore, and we know that the energy that made up the wave continues, but that unique combination of material and energy lasted only for an instant -- every moment as the wave rushed towards shore it was different -- and then is dissipated.
It doesn't make the wave any less meaningful or any less beautiful or any less of a wave to acknowledge and accept this.
