Sanskrit
पत्रं पुष्पं फलं तोयं यो मे भक्त्या प्रयच्छति । तदहं भक्त्युपहृतमश्नामि प्रयतात्मनः ॥
patraṃ puṣpaṃ phalaṃ toyaṃ yo me bhaktyā prayacchati tad ahaṃ bhaktyupahṛtam aśnāmi prayatātmanaḥ
Translation
He who offereth to Me with devotion a leaf, a flower, a fruit, water, that I accept from the striving self, offered as it is with devotion.
Annie Besant · The Bhagavad-Gita, translated by Annie Besant (4th ed., 1922) — Wikisource · Public Domain
Explanation
Among the most cited verses in the Gita, and deservedly so: after several verses cataloguing elaborate Vedic sacrifice, the bar for reaching Krishna drops to a leaf, a flower, a fruit, water — and the operative word is bhaktyā, offered with devotion. This isn’t an argument against ritual complexity as such; it’s a claim about what ritual was always actually doing, which is registering the state of the offerer (prayatātmanaḥ, the striving, purified self), not the market value of the offering. It reframes everything since verse 20: what made the earlier ritualists’ worship transactional was never the elaborateness of the rite but the motive behind it.