How can a deity's karma be corrupted by the reincarnation cycle?

Question

Reincarnation is the cycle of birth and death that all human souls traverse in their journey to a higher state, in which they permanently leave that cycle. When the body dies, its soul ascends to a higher realm, where it wanders the interim with other souls until it is ready to be reborn into a new body. This process occurs over an indeterminate amount of time, which can be anywhere from a few minutes to hundreds of years. An avatar is a god-like individual with the ability to manipulate the forces of nature: air, water, fire, and earth. He is also regarded as an important religious figure who has reached spiritual enlightenment which allows him to leave the cycle of reincarnation but has elected to stay in the mortal world to pass on his knowledge and help others reach their own enlightenment. When the current physical form of the avatar dies, their spirit ascends back into the cycle of birth and death to be transmigrated into a new body. During this time, the followers of the avatar, a religious sect of holy monks, begin their search for the new incarnated being with the use of visions and interpreted signs.

When the avatar is eventually located and trained, it begins to regain the memories of its past lives, re-gaining all the knowledge of its previous cycles. However, a disaster has struck this tradition. The avatar and its followers have lost a war to the Fire Nation led by the SCP (Super Communist Party), forcing them into exile. Given sanctuary in a foreign land, they continue to advocate for freedom for their country from the SCP. Sadly, the avatar is approaching the end of its current life due to old age. The super communists seek to take advantage of this situation by reincarnating the avatar themselves. Through an ancient ritual, they can ensure that the spirit of the departed being is specifically bound to an unborn child. By manipulating the transmigration process, they can move the spirit of the avatar to the front of the reincarnation cycle for it to be born immediately to a subject in their possession. This will give them access to a powerful being under their direct control for their own purposes. The process worked with disastrous consequences, as the resulting child's karma became corrupted. It then set about its own visions of world conquest as it purged all who stood in its way, including its previous followers.

How can hijacking the reincarnation cycle lead to an evil demi-god?

Answer 1

/their spirit ascends to the heavens, where it is placed within the cycle of birth and death to await its new body. This can take hundreds of years,/

There are lots of other things in the hundreds of years waiting room.

The avatar would have been fine with being reincarnated in the baby chosen by the SCP. It is confident in its abilities. It looked forward to working on the SCP from the inside and showing them the true path.

Unfortunately there are other things biding their eternity in that waiting room; things no longer on earth but not ascended to Nirvana either. These are things that would also like another chance on earth, and the ancient ritual bypasses a lot of the safeguards that keep those things stranded in this limbo. One of these things shouldered the avatar aside and rode the ritual down to its new baby home. It is a bad thing.

Actually several bad things. They all crammed into the baby together when the door opened.

Answer 2

Reincarnation is a time of rest and rebuilding, and is flavored by events in the Material Plane. By spending so little time before reincarnation, the soul hungers for energy so badly that they must:

• Prepare the Spiritual Plane for their arrival by killing certain kinds of people/animals/magic trees, which leads them on their crusade, or
• Prayer needs to be undertaken just right, and the Avatar must guide them, or
• Deforestation is ruining the energy in the Spiritual Plane, so the Avatar is destroying huge farms to allow them to return to the wild, where the spiritual plane will taste better. I like this one because it gives a long timeline (decades) before the Avatar can return to the Spiritual Plane to suck up the energy.

Or perhaps they wish to be the world ruler to initiate some sort of mass action by the whole world, that when the Avatar is killed by a loyal follower to enter the Spiritual Plane shortly after, they can suck up the mass amounts of suicide or prayer or births (i.e. they mandate families to all have children on the same day).

Answer 3

The upload to the new avatar occurs bottom-up, the process is incomplete. (Or done with a lack of finesse)

By which I mean, basic brain-functions, such as breathing and maintaining the body, are left to to the host, the internal wiring of the hippocampus and the cerebellum, the wiring from the body/brain-stem through the pons the parts of the brain destined to control voluntary movement, reflex-overriding, speech, eyesight, hearing are programmed first, bottom-up. Then comes language, the formation of the structures comprising superficial connections across the cerebral cortex, associative abilities, intelligence - with this comes the power.

Lastly, the memories are connected all the way to the pre-frontal cortex, the medial frontal cortex - essentially the higher functions. The social-skills, the higher reasoning abilities, the brain is imbued with the conscience and the true essence of the god-head last.

If the process is incomplete for any reason, the avatar becomes the host of powerful abilities, perhaps some memories (a bit fuzzy and corrupted), and an adolescent's lack of social-skills, emotional-control and higher reasoning. The lack of restraint of the creature's powers inside a mind that's easily manipulated by strong emotion and fallacious reasoning makes them the perfect tool for the corrupt human masters.

Answer 4

The time that a soul spends waiting to be reborn isn't merely waiting until a suitable body becomes available. In fact, just about any body will do. Actually this time is a period of meditation while the soul rids itself of the attachments, ambitions and regrets of its former lives.

So, if a soul is forcibly reincarnated before it has had time to meditate, then it is reborn with lingering issues hanging over from its former lives.

It may not be terribly unfortunate for a common soul to be forcibly reincarnated, since it may have only petty unresolved issues, and may not be able to do much about them, but for a powerful soul such as the Avatar, which brings great powers with it when it is reborn, it will still be filled with old regrets, ambitions and attachments.

For such a soul to be in a youthful body which has great energy and lacks self-control is a very dangerous combination. There's no telling what old ambition or regret may come to dominate the reincarnated Avatar's thoughts, and lead him or her to engage upon a campaign to fulfill it.

To think that such a forcibly reincarnated Avatar will be pliable and impressionable is a grave mistake. The Avatar will be born with an agenda based upon its past lives and the vagaries of the body into which it was born, and as soon as s/he is capable, the Avatar will set out to fulfill that agenda. The more opposed that those who are now custodians of the reincarnated Avatar were to the Avatar in previous lives, the more likely that the new Avatar will be to crush them should s/he be opposed by them. The Avatar has access to lifetimes worth of memories providing invaluable experience on techniques of dividing and conquering foes, and those who have forcibly reincarnated the Avatar must either support him/her unreservedly, or have those techniques applied against them.