The location Ukkaṭṭhā appears only a few times in the canon. But it always features some extraordinary event.
- It is the location of MN 1, where the Buddha gives an astonishing breakdown of existence, leaving the mendicants—all brahmins according to the commentary—displeased. This is the only time a discourse is directly set here.
- It is also the location of MN 49, where the Buddha reports that he had stayed there. This discourse, taking up similar existential themes as MN 1, pits the Buddha directly in a cosmic battle with Brahmā.
- At the end of DN 14, the Buddha recalls staying there, from where, as in MN 49, he ascended various Brahmā realms.
- In AN 4.36, the Buddha is travelling between Ukkaṭṭhā and Setavyā when the brahmin Doṇa saw the thousand-spoked wheels on his footprints. Following the Buddha, he asked if he were a god, which the Buddha denied. The thousand-spoked wheels are one of the marks of a great man, attributed to Brahmanical lore in the suttas, and this is the only place they are actually seen by someone outside of the context of the 32 marks.
Which raises the question: why is such an obscure location the setting for three such astonishing teachings, all of which share, implicitly or explicitly, a repudiation of Brahmanism?
There is one other sutta where the place appears. This is DN 3 Ambaṭṭhasutta. The Buddha is staying at a village of the Kosalan brahmins named Icchānaṅgala. From the research of Lauren Bausch, we know that the Kosalan brahmins developed a distinctive philosophy that was closely intertwined with the origins of Buddhism.
Icchānaṅgala is not far from Sāvatthī to the east. Ukkaṭṭhā must be nearby too, for the leading brahmin Pokkharasāti is staying there when he hears of the Buddha’s arrival. The events of DN 3 are pivotal: Pokkharasāti is embarrassed by the behavior of his precocious student Ambaṭṭha and then converts to Buddhism. Several of the suttas that follow refer to this conversion, so it must have been a major event that rippled through the brahmanical community.
Indeed, it seems to be no exaggeration to say that, for the suttas, the home of Pokkharasāti at Ukkaṭṭhā was the primary center of Kosalan Brahmanism. Pokkharasāti’s endorsement of the Buddha was not just one conversion among many, but was the starting point of the acceptance of Buddhism among the intellectual and spiritual elite.
Thus while it seems the Buddha visited there rarely, it became the setting for some of his most celebrated encounters with brahmins.