A beautiful story:

There was a beautiful garden with many trees and varieties of flowers and fruits. Three friends were walking near this garden that had a big wall around it. One of them climbed the wall and peeped inside.

He cried out, ‘Oh, such a beautiful garden!’ He jumped into the garden and started enjoying the fruits. The second man climbed the wall and saw the garden. He too felt it was beautiful, but he had a little bit of courtesy. He turned and said to the third man who was below, ‘Dear friend, there is a beautiful garden below. Come, I am going in.’ Saying this, he jumped over and started enjoying the fruits.

The third man climbed the wall and saw the garden. He saw his two friends and understood the level of joy and bliss that they were enjoying. Then he said to himself, ‘Let me go down and tell all the people about this beautiful paradise. I will bring them all to enjoy this garden.’

An incarnation is someone who comes down to tell his fellowmen about the blissful place that he experienced.

The man who descends from the Divine on planet earth to express the bliss of that divinity and to make you realize what he has experienced is an incarnation. Incarnations as such have no karma. They have nothing to achieve, nothing to gain. If they don’t have anything to enjoy why should they be in the body?

They come down only for the love of humanity. Incarnations take a human body just to liberate more beings from the cycle of life and death, from the grip of karma.

A beautiful story from the devotional vedic scripture Bhagavatam:

Krishna reached the banks of river Yamuna with the gopis, his milkmaid friends. They wanted to cross the river but there was no way to cross.

Krishna declared, ‘If I am a true brahmachari, then let the Yamuna part and let us go across.’

The Yamuna parted.

Outwardly, it may seem that Krishna was with the girls like other ordinary men. But Krishna was beyond the body-mind. His actions did not carry the intention of an ordinary man. It is the intention of any act that matters, not the act itself.

Intention is the baggage, the karma, not the action. If action creates intention, it becomes the baggage. Pure action with no end objective is karma.

See, whatever you are doing in the presence of the master, you are doing for the master. You know it is in no way going to build your name or fame. So, the action happens without intention. There is no intention. The intention is the master’s. The action is yours. Intention is in the being of the person who has no intentions!

You see, the total sanchita karma can be yours or mine. Mine is divine play. Yours is suffering. When it started, your total sanchita karma also started as a divine play. But, after gathering more and more gathered agamya karma, it became dirty.

Because I have no karma, when you flow with me you will also act without intention. Action without intention is living enlightenment.

source: Living Enlightenment