Tapussa, with his brother Bhallika, is one of the two travelling merchants who became the first lay disciples of the Buddha, offering him rice-cake and honey in the weeks after his awakening and receiving eight hairs from his head. The Pali sources place their homeland at Ukkala, a name Mon and Burmese tradition reads as the delta of Lower Burma, and carries the brothers home to enshrine the hairs at the Shwedagon in the reign of King Okkalapa. Their journey binds the earliest moment of Buddhist history to the sacred landscape the Mon claim as Suvaṇṇabhūmi.