Board Thread:Naruto Discussions/@comment-25192437-20150307225810/@comment-1458758-20150310201423

Seelentau wrote: It was said that Karura's will lived on in Gaara as an automatic defense. But when she was still alive, how could the will have already lived inside Gaara, causing the eye markings?

Why doesn Karura need to pass her ability on to Gaara? Why not

Karura dies -> her will lives on in Gaara's sand and controls it

You know, like the manga explaned it...? Minato had to be alive in order to create the chakra Minato inside Naruto's seal. There's nothing to suggest that such a thing can't be put in place while the person is alive, and the will inside Gaara's sand is distinctly less advanced than the ones that existed in Naruto's seal. There's no reason Karura couldn't have put that in place while alive and it lived on after her, just like Minato did with Naruto's seal. As for the other thing.

Seelentau wrote: And by the way, why does Gaara have the eye markings when it's his mother's chakra that controls the automatic defense? If anyone, wouldn't Karura be the one with Magnet Release? You're the one that suggested Karura was the one with the ability, and I said, the theory with less assumptions is that Gaara has the power, it's just whatever Karura did that makes use of it.

As for how the manga explained it, this is a case where Kishi's vagueness screws us.

'Will' is not a physical force, even in the Naruto universe. A person's 'will', like the will of fire and such, is an insubstantial and widely metaphoric thing. For Karura's will to defend Gaara, especially after she's dead, the means for this to occur would have to be through some form of technique or chakra infusion. Given that, the Minato and Kushina entities within Naruto didn't exactly have long to talk with him before they burned out, we can infer that, since Gaara's sand shield didn't burn out in the firs few years of his life, that it was a more solid, consistant thing put in place to defend Gaara, like some form of seal or similar ability that made the sand automatically react when Gaara was attacked.