The Zen monk Eisai, founder of the Rinzai school of Buddhism, is generally credited for popularizing tea in Japan. In 1191, Eisai returned from a trip to China and brought back tea seeds which he planted on the island of Hirado and in the mountains of Kyushu. He also gave some seeds to the monk Myōe, abbot of the Kōzan-ji temple in Kyoto. Myōe planted these seeds in and Uji, which became the sites of the first large scale cultivation of tea in Japan. At first, Toganoo tea was seen as the finest in Japan and was called , as opposed to produced elsewhere in Japan. By the 15th century, however, Uji tea surpassed that of Toganoo, and the terms and came to refer to Uji tea and non-Uji tea, respectively.