My name is Karin Ulrike Soika, and I am a visual artist and philosopher (you can take a closer look at this aspect of my work at www.soika.com). Since 2009, I have been working on a contemporary interpretation of the I Ching as part of my artistic work and my research combines psychology, philosophical anthropology, Eastern philosophy, and the theoretical foundations of traditional Chinese medicine.
I was motivated to embark on my project because I had Richard Wilhelm’s translation of the ‘Book of Changes’ with me on many long journeys – with varying degrees of success. Let’s be honest: the original texts are anything but accessible.
But, as I said, I am an artist. And I like the job description: ‘The artist’s task is to fathom the meaning.’ So it was only logical that I asked myself, ‘What is the meaning of the hexagrams?’, and got to work. That was in 2009.
However, my research journey had actually begun much earlier without my knowledge. I first came into contact with acupuncture in New York in 1983. The therapist who treated me was Dr Ching Y Ting, whose grandfather opened China’s first school of traditional herbal medicine in Shanghai and was one of the last royal doctors to work with the emperor in the Forbidden City. Many more treatments followed on different continents, with different treatment concepts and successes. In 2010 I started to deal more intensively with the theoretical foundations of classical acupuncture.
From the very beginning I made the experience that acupuncture not only affects my body but also my psyche. In view of the meanwhile scientifically recognized interrelation of body and soul, this seemed only logical to me. In a book by psychiatrist Leon Hammer I found first evidence for my assumption, in the meantime I have come across numerous corresponding references in the specialist literature, namely that individual meridians are very precisely characterized and represent very specific psychological functions.
Exactly this aspect – individual characteristics and functions – now also characterizes the I Ching’s individual trigrams. And indeed: The order of the later Heaven or Inner World Order according to King Wen, which I discovered later, shows the trigrams in the chronological order of their emergence in the course of the year, a classification that also exists for the functional circuits of acupuncture. So there it is, the nexus between acupuncture and I Ching.
The second aspect that interested me was how the two trigrams, which together form a hexagram, are interrelated. Upper and lower trigrams, first and second core characters, these are terms that are quite common in the work with the I Ching. However, in my experience the fact that when questioning the I Ching the hexagram is built from bottom to top, and that consequently these individual sub-trigrams practically evolve from each other, receives little attention. Accordingly I have worked out this aspect in my interpretation model.
Any intelligent question already contains its equally intelligent response. This in mind, the hexagram’s transformations show us where to focus our attention. So that we, then, in the spirit of Wu Wei, do not do more, but rather less.
