Tapussa

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.

Domains

• merit and patronage

Powers

• offer the first alms after the Enlightenment

Epithets

• Paṭhama-upāsaka — The first lay discipleThe Vinaya Piṭaka, Mahāvagga I (Sacred Books of the East, 1881) (primary)

Relations

• sibling: BhallikaThe two are always named as merchant brothers.The Vinaya Piṭaka, Mahāvagga I (Sacred Books of the East, 1881) (primary)
• ally: OkkalapaDelivered the relics enshrined in Okkalapa's reign.Donald M. Stadtner, Sacred Sites of Burma (Bangkok: River Books, 2011) (secondary)

Sources

• Tapussa and Bhallika were the first lay disciples, who offered the Buddha his first alms after the Enlightenment and received eight hairs later enshrined, in Mon-Burmese tradition, at the Shwedagon.: The Vinaya Piṭaka, Mahāvagga I (Rhys Davids and Oldenberg trans., Sacred Books of the East, 1881) (primary); Donald M. Stadtner, Sacred Sites of Burma (Bangkok: River Books, 2011) (secondary)