There are some interesting distortions in his account, no doubt a result of the fact that Bayle is getting his information at such a distance and more than second hand. Bayle’s source appears to be a work called Bibliotheque universelle, which contained a Jesuit summary or epitome of a work by Confucius, which included a prolegomenon on the life of the Buddha and Buddhist ideas as they understood them. The section outlining the life of the Buddha is worth quoting at length (this is Bayle quoting his source):

We find there, “that he, having retired into the desert when he reached his nineteenth year and having put himself under the discipline of four Gymnosophists in order to learn philosophy from them, remained under their instruction until he was thirty years old, when, rising one morning before daybreak and contemplating the planet Venus, the mere sight of it gave him at once perfect knowledge of the first principle, so that being full of divine inspiration, or rather of pride and madness, he undertook to instruct men, represented himself as a god, and attracted eighty thousand disciples…. At the age of seventy-nine, finding himself near death, he told his disciples that, for the forty years he had preached to the world, he had not told the truth to them; that he had concealed it under a veil of metaphors and figures of speech; but that it was time to tell it to them. ‘It is,’ he said, ‘that there is nothing to seek, nor anything to put one’s hopes on, except the nothingness and vacuum that is the principle of all things.'”

[ellipsis in original]

One familiar with Buddhism will no doubt find it interesting how this Jesuit account largely tracks the typical account while departing from it in some interesting ways (I’m particularly amused by the meditation and realization under the bodhi tree being replaced with beholding Venus one morning. “Hey look, it’s the Morning Star–wait, it all makes sense now!”).

Bayle and the Jesuit source he quotes go on to describe the Buddha’s teaching, asserting that the Buddha had two sets of teachings, one for the common man, and one for the initiate. The public would be taught that there was a real difference between good and evil, that there was reward or punishment after death, that one could find happiness in 32 marks and eight qualities, that the Buddha was a divine savior, and that there were five moral precepts and six “works of mercy” (six paramitas, I suppose?) that one must follow or else face divine punishment. The Buddha was said to have taught his initiates that all is vacuum or real nothingness, that all comes forth from this vacuum and returns to it, that everything is a part of this vacuum, and that this vacuum is one single substance which appears in different forms, as water can be a liquid, solid, or gas, though in any state it has no thought, power, or moral qualities.

There is quite a lot to unpack and there and relate to Buddhism as it’s usually understood nowadays, but I’ll just quickly touch on two things.

Shariputra, ever since I attained Buddhahood I have through various causes and various similes widely expounded my teachings and have used countless expedient means to guide living beings and cause them to renounce their attachments.

(2) Bayle and his source’s take on emptiness, or shunyata, (which is referred to rather inaccurately “vacuum” or most inaccurately “real nothingness”) is interesting. It appears to be a thought of as a kind of substantialized nonbeing from which beings are produced, or a kind of substratum. Bayle is right to wonder about the paradoxical nature of this conceptualization, saying:

I cannot convince myself that they took the word “nothing” in its strict sense, and I imagine that they understood it as people do when they say that there is nothing in an empty chest. We have seen that they ascribe attributes to the first principle that suppose that they conceive it as a liquor. It is therefore probable that they divested it only of what is gross and sensible in matter…. I believe they understood by that word something very much like what modern thinkers understand by the term “space”…

Which, though charitable, betrays in Bayle or his source no knowledge of the concept of shunyata as a kind of radical contingency or dependent origination. This also makes me wonder if there isn’t a reflection here of debates within Buddhism about the status of the ultimate reality, given that shunyata was in some schools identified with Buddha-nature, and Buddha-nature is presented in many texts as a real, unconditioned reality, or svabhava.

One final note. Hume’s bundle theory of the self is sometimes compared to the Buddhist theory of non-self. Though Bayle’s note doesn’t seem to contain any information about the non-self doctrine (at least in the abridged translation I’ve read), Hume was known to have read the Historical and Critical Dictionary.