提婆

提婆之名在漢傳，先於論而見於一則廟中之事。他往大自在天廟求見，主廟者告以天像至神、見者失守；提婆不受此說，謂神若果如所言，「乃但令我見之」。及入，天像搖動怒目視之，提婆問曰：神則神矣，何其小也——當以威靈感人、智德伏物，而假黃金以自多。語畢，「即便登梯鑿出其眼」〔T50n2048 0186c25〕。

Deva's name enters the Chinese record not first through a treatise but through an incident in a temple. He went to the shrine of Maheśvara asking to see the image; the keeper told him the image was too numinous to look upon and that those who saw it lost their bearings for a hundred days. Deva would not accept this: if the god were truly as described, then "let him simply let me see him." When he entered, the image stirred and glared at him, and Deva said: numinous indeed — but how small; a god should move people by majesty and subdue things by wisdom and virtue, not aggrandize himself by borrowed gold. Having said it, "he thereupon climbed a ladder and gouged out its eye" 〔T50n2048 0186c25〕.

觀者疑其慢神，提婆解之曰：「神明遠大。故以近事試我」〔T50n2048 0186c28〕，我登金聚、出頗梨，正是要「令汝等知神不假質精不託形」〔T50n2048 0186c29〕——吾既不慢神，亦不辱也。破的不是神，是把神繫於黃金頗梨之見。這一路數與《百論》全帙相貫：所破者從來是加在事上的執，不是事。

The onlookers suspected him of contempt for the god; Deva explained: "The divine is far and great, and so it tested me by a near thing" 〔T50n2048 0186c28〕 — that he climbed the heap of gold and took out the crystal precisely to "let you know that the divine does not depend on substance, and the pure does not lodge in form" 〔T50n2048 0186c29〕; he had neither slighted the god nor dishonored it. What he broke was not the god but the view that binds the god to gold and crystal. The method runs through the whole Hundred Treatise: what is refuted is always the grasping laid upon a thing, never the thing.

本編所譯《百論》，卷端署「提婆菩薩造　婆藪開士釋」，其人與其書之關係，藏中即止於此。生卒之年漢傳不出，僧肇序唯以佛滅後八百餘年紀之，非西元之數，故本編如實標不詳，不代為補。

The Hundred Treatise translated in this edition is headed "composed by the bodhisattva Deva, explained by the adept Vasu"; on the relation of the man to the book the canon says no more than this. His dates the Chinese record does not give — Sengzhao's preface reckons only "more than eight hundred years after the Buddha's parinirvāṇa," which is no Common-Era figure — and so this edition marks them honestly as unknown rather than supplying them.