This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Eisai travelled to China twice, in 1168 and again in 1187, and on his second journey trained four years under a Linji, or Chan, master, a documented course of study that made him the first Japanese monk certified as a Zen teacher there. Returning to Japan in 1191, he founded the country's first Zen temple, Hoonji in Kyushu, introducing what Japan came to call the Rinzai school, distinct from the Tendai training in which he had already been ordained at eleven decades earlier.
The established Tendai, Shingon and Pure Land schools already based in Kyoto opposed his new teaching, a documented resistance that pushed him away from the old imperial capital rather than toward it, and he moved instead to Kamakura, seat of the shogunate and its warrior class. There his martially inflected Zen teaching found patronage the Kyoto schools had refused him, and Hojo Masako, wife of the shogunate's founder, sponsored his construction of Jufukuji, documented as Kamakura's first Zen center.
That a teaching refused a hearing by Kyoto's already established schools found instead a warrior capital willing to build its first Zen center around it marks Eisai's path from Hoonji to Jufukuji as a documented case where opposition in one center of religious authority became the occasion for patronage in an entirely different one.