Nirvana supplies the destination of a polemic, not a Buddhist definition
The Tolstoyan's will is frozen by a Buddhist instinct that all special actions are evil.
Tibet is a figurative destination: Nietzsche's strenuous ascent supposedly ends in the same immobility as Tolstoy's renunciation. Nothing in the paragraph establishes an actual Tibetan episode or a Tibetan source. The phrase about a land of nothing makes Buddhist release serve as an image of moral vacancy.
A useful check is the Dhammapada, chapter XIV, verses 183–85. It combines abstention from evil with cultivating good and purifying the mind; the adjacent verses praise nibbana, patience and disciplined practice. Such discrimination between actions directly qualifies the claim that Buddhist instinct treats every particular action as evil. The inspected translation is Acharya Buddharakkhita's, published by the Buddhist Publication Society in 1985 and transcribed in 1996. This ancient Pali canonical witness is a comparator, not a reconstruction of Tibetan Buddhism or of Chesterton's sources.
There is also an ironic point of contact with Nietzsche: The Antichrist, §20, calls Buddhism nihilistic while preferring its treatment of suffering to Christian explanations through sin. See §§20–23 in Mencken's later translation. That makes Chesterton's imagined destination intelligible, but does not demonstrate borrowing. Both polemics require checking against Buddhist sources rather than allowing either writer to define Buddhism for the reader.
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