Meditation, hunt-a-monk games and 2 hours of silence: Welcome to Buddhist summer camp

(RNS and NPR) — At Dharma Camp, a Buddhist sleepaway camp in Molalla, Oregon, the day starts with 20 minutes of meditation and silence through chores until after breakfast — no small feat for some of the teens and tweens who attend. “You just wanna talk and talk and talk,” said Isabell Brice, age 10. “Like, you just wanna talk about your dreams and like, ‘Oh, I saw a flying chameleon! Oh, I saw a flying whale!’”

American summer camps have long carried religious identities, beginning with the 19th century’s “muscular Christianity,” which motivated the earliest summer programs, and continuing into the 20th century’s robust network of Jewish camps, according to Leslie Paris, a University of British Columbia professor and author of “Children’s Nature: The Rise of the American Summer Camp.”

But Buddhist ones remain rare: Despite an American Buddhist population more than half the size of the Jewish one , there’s no national camp network and just a handful of camps s prinkled across the country figuring out what a Buddhist summer camp looks like.

Some camps, like the one run by the Los Angeles Buddhist Coordinating Council, are specifically for Buddhist church members, but…