Eihei Dōgen’s own life and activity unfolded entirely within Japan, yet the form and strength of the Sōtō institution he founded created the conditions for his voice to be heard far beyond its shores. After his death, his successors consolidated monasteries such as Eiheiji and preserved his key writings, especially the Shōbōgenzō, as the living heart of Sōtō training. Over time, this stable monastic and textual tradition became the well from which later generations would draw when carrying his teaching abroad. In this sense, the international spread of his thought rests upon a deeply rooted Japanese lineage that continued to regard his works as normative for both practice and understanding.

The movement beyond Japan unfolded much later, largely through the meeting of this lineage with the modern world. Translation of Dōgen’s writings into European languages opened a door for readers who had no direct access to the Japanese tradition, allowing the Shōbōgenzō and related texts to speak in new cultural settings. At the same time, academic study in universities and scholarly publications began to treat his work as a serious philosophical and religious resource, not only as a monastic manual. Through such study, his reflections on practice, time, and awakening entered broader conversations about religion and thought, and his name became familiar far outside Buddhist circles.

Another powerful current of transmission arose through lived practice rather than scholarship alone. Japanese Sōtō priests traveled to regions where Japanese immigrants had settled and established temples that carried Dōgen’s liturgy, meditation forms, and textual study into new lands. From these roots, teachers trained in Sōtō Zen founded practice centers that welcomed both descendants of immigrants and those with no ethnic connection to Japan. Some Western practitioners also traveled to Japan, trained in Sōtō monasteries, and then returned home to teach, shaping communities where Dōgen’s emphasis on zazen and everyday conduct as practice could be directly experienced rather than merely read about.

As these centers matured, they became hubs for the further dissemination of Dōgen’s thought through books, recorded talks, and organized study. Lay communities formed around regular meditation and the reading of his texts, and his writings began to circulate in many languages through both religious and academic channels. In this way, the spread of his teaching beyond Japan has been neither a sudden export nor a purely intellectual fashion, but a gradual unfolding in which translation, scholarship, immigrant communities, and dedicated practice centers all converge. What began as the guidance of a single Japanese monastic reformer thus continues to echo wherever people sit in silence and turn to his words as a mirror for their own path.