Groaning stones, mountain ghosts, and sacred trees

On Earth justice and folk religion; plus a trip to Indigo, a utopian bookstore in Busan, South Korea and Vanessa Hope's new film Invisible Nation

Last week I touched a tree that was three thousand years old and I felt, for a moment, instant tranquility. I think the people around me felt it, too. “You see this tree and can’t not believe in tree gods,” said Lee Mao-jung, who studies Taiwanese popular religion. Albert and our three-year-old P. and I had tagged along with a group of religious scholars, led by Dr. Chen Yi-yun, to the majestic Alishan mountains, home of primeval cypresses and camphor trees.

The next morning, I saw a famous groaning rock. The story goes like this: in the early 1920s, the timber industry was surging under Japanese rule. Railroads were laid down to ship wood. Every night, railroad workers heard sighs coming from the forest, a mournful, otherworldly sound. Whenever they heard that sound, something unlucky would happen. After searching, they realized the sighs were coming from a large boulder. To quiet the stone, the villagers brought in a Buddhist monk, who carved into the rock the four characters nanwu …