Would this question be OK

Question

It may come off as truculent or trolling, but I'm genuinely interested!

In what way is Buddhism different in the West and in traditionally Buddhist nations?

Thanks

Answer 1

Can you make the question more specific? It seems to me there's quite a variety of "Buddhism" in any country -- e.g. perhaps some difference between ordained and lay...

Then an even greater variety between for example Vietnam and China.

And differences -- and similarities -- between East and West.

What do you want to know?

I guess the most obvious difference between countries is a difference in the languages; but even that's not so because a lot of Buddhism-in-the-West is immigrants who retain their original languages.

I found this question unanswerable. I assume it was prompted by something specific or personal, but you disguised that by phrasing it as a general question, so much so that I couldn't tell what you were asking.

Answer 2

You wrote, "not all difficult questions are a bad fit for stackexchnage!".

The Help says,

You should only ask practical, answerable questions based on actual problems that you face. Chatty, open-ended questions diminish the usefulness of our site and push other questions off the front page.

Maybe a lot of users don't know that Help text -- and the Help does say the same for every Stack Exchange site, not only Buddhism.SE, even though each site has its own customs about what's on-topic -- nevertheless I think it's quite good advice about what makes for an answerable question.

A lot of question here are theoretical -- even they tend to be specific and about, "an actual problem that you face" -- for example, "I'm reading this [quoted bit of scripture] and I don't understand what this bit means?", or something like that.

Or "practical" questions like, "I have such-and-such problem with my life or practice?", or, "How do you do X?", etc.