Against the elaborate and expensive sacrificial system the Gita inherits, chapter nine sets a single verse that has probably shaped Hindu devotional practice more than any other line in the book. Whoever offers a leaf, a flower, a fruit or water with devotion, Krishna says, that offering of the pure hearted he accepts. The instruction that follows is broader still: whatever you do, whatever you eat, whatever you offer or give away, whatever discipline you undertake, do it as an offering.
The economics of that verse are the point. A leaf and water are free. A sacrifice requiring priests, fire, animals and land is not. The verse relocates the whole transaction from what is given to the disposition of the giver, and it does so without polemic, simply by naming what is acceptable.
Three verses later comes the chapter's most contested line. Those who take refuge, it says, even if they are of what it calls sinful or lowly birth, and it names women, vaishyas and shudras, reach the highest goal. Devotional movements have read this for a thousand years as an explicit removal of the barriers of birth and sex from the path to liberation, and it was cited in exactly that sense by poets and preachers who had no standing in the Vedic system.
Others have pointed out that the verse achieves its inclusion by grouping those categories together under a phrase that marks them as lowly, so that the sentence both opens the door and restates who was outside it. The atlas records the reading as disputed. Neither camp is a modern invention, and neither is being generous to the other.