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For our purposes let's assume someone is attempting to meditate using a Buddhist-style of meditation or meditate within a Buddhist framework.

Are attempts to determine ways of improving the meditation experience, attempts to diagnose those problems, etc on-topic for the purposes of this site?

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Since meditation is such an important part of (most) Buddhist practice, it would strike me as very strange for questions about it be considered off topic. However, if that decision was made, I'd suggest changing the group name from "Buddhism" to "Buddhology" or "Buddhist Studies".

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The problem is that answers would be subjective, and thus choosing a best answer would be as well. Something like "What does Buddhism (or [type] Buddhism) say about [meditation experience]?" instead of "What do I do when [meditation experience] occurs?" might work.

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    Well, in this context, I don't think picking an accepted answer would have to be subjective - whichever answer helped OP solve his/her challenge is the one that OP should mark as accepted. This is much like how it works at e.g. The Workplace or Academia - answers on those sites are in many cases subjective, but are backed up by personal experience. I imagine we could get a similar thing working here for questions about meditation.
    – senshin
    Jun 18, 2014 at 2:44
  • Okay, sounds good :) certainly those type of questions would be ones I'd answer... just thought it would be strange to have a bunch of teachers offering different advice from different traditions.
    – yuttadhammo
    Jun 18, 2014 at 2:46
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My own answer on this one is that I firmly believe that such questions should be on-topic for the purpose of this site. If we look, for example, at the question from MartialArts.SE of How can I keep my back straight in my horse stance? we see a question about a personal challenge with a particular aspect that can benefit from experience.

In Buddhism in particular many challenges also have years of history and doctrinal support (as @senshin says), so I think allowing the questions in general is a good policy.

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In my "home-" stackexchange concerning math we have the practice to tag questions, which allow/provoke/require lists of answers/of various proposals as "community-wiki" -

(and at the same moment as this comes to my mind I think, that questions like "I've come to this and that problem in my approach to meditation: what shall I do?" should very likely receive many and/or even lists of answers... )

  • so "community wiki" tagging might be a solution here.
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    Just because a question may attract multiple answers does not mean it is necessarily a "list question". It is important to distinguish between (1) questions that may get multiple answers because there are multiple ways of solving the problem in the question and (2) questions like "what is your favorite X". It is only the (2) questions that get tagged as [big-list] and community wiki'd at Mathematics. I think that the kind of meditation questions we are talking about here, on the other hand, are of type (1).
    – senshin
    Jun 18, 2014 at 13:57

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