The text now called Nihon Shoki was already a carefully shaped composite at the moment of its compilation, drawing together older court records, clan genealogies, and Chinese-style historiography into a single imperial chronicle. From the outset it wove together multiple mythic and political strands, especially in its presentation of the kami, the heavenly realm, and the divine ancestry of the imperial house. Rather than a single, later “revised edition,” what emerges is a work whose first redaction already reflects strong editorial choices about which cosmological visions and lineages would stand at the center of the emerging Shinto order.

Over the centuries, this foundational compilation was transmitted through several manuscript lineages, each marked by the small shifts that hand-copying inevitably brings. Some lines tended to preserve more archaic forms and fewer harmonizing corrections, while others show more standardization, clarification, and attempts to smooth out tensions in chronology or myth. Modern critical editions rest on the collation of a limited number of relatively early manuscripts from these lines, and the thousands of minor variants they record are typically at the level of characters, word order, or brief phrases rather than sweeping narrative change. The core cosmological structure—creation of heaven and earth, succession of deities, descent from the High Plain of Heaven, and the sacral ancestry of the emperor—remains remarkably stable through this process.

Within the work itself, the compilers preserved a striking plurality of mythic voices by explicitly recording alternate accounts with formulas such as “it is also said that…”. These internal variants offer different versions of creation, of the emergence and ordering of the kami, of the descent of the heavenly grandson, and of the deeds and reigns of the earliest emperors. In doing so, the text both acknowledges rival regional and clan traditions and subtly subordinates them to a chosen main line that supports Yamato and Ise-centered cosmology. The result is a canon that does not erase difference but frames it, allowing multiple cosmological possibilities to coexist under an imperial horizon.

Later ages did not so much rewrite the Nihon Shoki as surround it with layers of interpretation that effectively “revised” how its cosmology was understood. Medieval Buddhist and syncretic commentators read its myths through the lens of buddhas and bodhisattvas, while nativist scholars sought to strip away such overlays and recover a more “pure” kami vision. Nationalistic readings sharpened its imperial mythic elements for their own purposes, even as philological scholarship worked to restore earlier textual forms. Across these currents, the written body of the Nihon Shoki remained largely intact, yet its spiritual resonance and doctrinal weight within Shinto thought shifted, as each age found in its subtle variants and layered voices a mirror for its own understanding of heaven, earth, and the divine order.