Dōgen’s work on the Shōbōgenzō unfolds as a long, careful shaping of a living body of teaching rather than the production of a single fixed book. At Kōshō-ji, he began by delivering sermons in vernacular Japanese that were then written down as independent fascicles, each a self-contained exploration of a key theme. These early writings did not yet form a closed canon; instead, they constituted an open, expanding collection, with some fascicles existing in more than one version. Even at this stage, Dōgen was already revising: reworking the records of his talks, adding scriptural citations, and tightening or reorganizing his arguments. The Shōbōgenzō in this period is best seen as a dynamic field of practice and expression, not yet bound by a fixed order or number.

The move to Eihei-ji brought a shift in both audience and editorial intention. Teaching a more stable monastic community, Dōgen increasingly emphasized explicitly monastic and disciplinary themes and drew more heavily on Chinese Chan sources and monastic codes. During this time he revisited earlier Kōshō-ji fascicles, copying or recasting them into more polished versions, while also composing new fascicles that complemented or corrected the emphases of the earlier ones. Out of this activity emerged the vision of a more coherent corpus, reflected in the 75-fascicle collection that later became the standard medieval form of the work. The selection and ordering in this collection suggest a deliberate attempt to balance central doctrinal concerns such as Buddha-nature, practice-realization, time, causality, and conduct.

Near the end of his life, Dōgen undertook an explicit review of this maturing corpus. The 75-fascicle catalogue traditionally associated with his final year shows him arranging the fascicles in a specific sequence, refining titles, and indicating revised or definitive versions of certain texts. This reveals a teacher not merely accumulating sermons, but consciously curating a structured body of Dharma, using titling, sequencing, and selective inclusion to recontextualize earlier writings in light of later insight. At the same time, he continued to compose additional fascicles beyond the 75, many of which display a sharpened emphasis on ethical conduct, repentance, and the ordering of communal life. These late writings can be read as a second, intensifying layer of instruction that nuances the earlier corpus, even though there was no opportunity to integrate them fully into a final, comprehensive arrangement.

Across both Kōshō-ji and Eihei-ji, Dōgen’s editorial work thus involved rewriting and polishing, reordering and grouping, elevating some pieces while leaving others outside the core catalogue. The Shōbōgenzō that emerges from this process is not simply a record of past talks, but a carefully shaped path of practice, where earlier and later fascicles illuminate one another. The ongoing revisions themselves embody the teaching: realization is not a static possession, but a ceaseless clarification, in which language, form, and community are continually brought into deeper alignment with the Dharma.