Was my question closed for being philosophical?
No extant questions ask about upaya and impermanence. Are we not allowed to ask "philosophical" questions? If that made sense, even, I have no idea why I'm using the site.
Was my question closed for being philosophical?
No extant questions ask about upaya and impermanence. Are we not allowed to ask "philosophical" questions? If that made sense, even, I have no idea why I'm using the site.
I don't understand why it was closed.
I also don't understand what "too philosophical" means.
If it were open I don't know what a good answer might look like.
And I don't have any firm suggestion for how to improve it.
One suggestion might be to ask more specifically about skillful means, for example,
What is skillful means? When and why was "skillful means" introduced into Buddhist pedagogy? Is all Buddhist teaching an example of skillful means? Are all skillful means half-truths, or benign lies? Can doctrine about "nirvana" be categorized as "skillful means"? How about other doctrine, for example the doctrine of impermanence?
I don't know whether the above would be a good question, or the question that you wanted to ask, but maybe it wouldn't be closed.
Another suggestion might be to give one or more examples of why you think that "impermanence" might be a "skillful means" doctrine -- that might clarify or focus the question and explain why you're asking it. Understand why the question is asked sometimes helps people to answer it.
Another suggestion might be to explain (in the question) how to tell whether an answer is correct. Are you asking for a canonical reference? A dictionary definition? A personal experience of some kind?
I find the comments a bit of a mess and hard to follow. It this meant to be a question about rebirth or something, are you saying "people are eternal so impermanence is a lie" or something like that? Or is that a side-track from talking with Martin?
I think it's reasonable to close a question when both the following are true:
If both of the above are true, then it's an open-ended question with too many correct answers (or no way of telling whether any particular is "correct"), which might be better suited to a discussion site (or chat) than to Q+A.
Another confusing thing about the question is that (according to Wikipedia) upaya is a term used in Mahayana Buddhism, including Tibetan. It might be better to specify more precisely which school of Buddhism you're asking about, perhaps even which author.
Or perhaps you're asking this question because some other Mahayana doctrine (you mentioned "birth and death") which are permanent and not impermanent.
Yes, it was closed for being both highly philosophical, hypothetical and speculative in nature.
Question is of poor quality with no elaboration on question-body.
I suggest you take a look at our guidelines for asking questions:
Before edit:
Question seems poorly constructed and lacks both context, definition of words (for new comers) and references. I'm not saying references should always be provided but in the case of asking about such a fundamental concept as "Impermanence" and asking whether its "partially-true", question-body should reflect that.
Question seems open-ended (ie. too philosophical, hypothethical) and should be narrowed down.
In its current format and I'm here talking about question-body before the edit, question lacks all of the above mentioned components.
After edit:
I still think question-quality is too low. Please provide:
Please provide the above mentioned edits and we will look at the question again.
I actually think this is an interesting question but context and definitions are not clearly formulated. Buddhism is huge and vast and for new comers it can be difficult to understand which concepts belong to what tradition or what a particular tradition holds as views on different topics.