अन्नाद्भवन्ति भूतानि पर्जन्यादन्नसम्भवः।यज्ञाद्भवति पर्जन्यो यज्ञः कर्मसमुद्भवः॥
annād bhavanti bhūtāni parjanyād anna-sambhavaḥyajñād bhavati parjanyo yajñaḥ karma-samudbhavaḥ
Word by word
The verse says
Living things come from food. Food comes from rain. Rain comes from offering. And offering comes from doing the work.
In plain words
Four links, and the chain closes at the end of the next verse.
Bodies from food. Food from rain. Rain from offering. Offering from action.
Read it backwards and it says something plain: your work, done this way, ends up in bodies.
Where you've felt this · in health
You trace a glass of water back. The tap, the reservoir, the weather, the sea, the sun. Nowhere in the chain is there a point where it started belonging to you.
Going deeper
A modern reader hits rain comes from sacrifice and stops, so it is worth being direct about it.
Taken as meteorology, the claim is false and the Gita is not improved by pretending otherwise. Rituals do not cause rainfall.
What the verse is actually doing is describing a closed circuit in which nothing is a starting point. That structure holds whatever you believe about ritual and weather. Every link depends on the one before, and the last link is human action — which means we are inside the circuit, not observing it.
That placement is the point. Arjuna wanted to step out and let the world proceed without him. The chain says there is no outside to step to.
And the sequence is deliberately physical: food, rain, bodies. After Chapter 2's long argument about what cannot be killed, Chapter 3 keeps insisting on the parts of you that can get hungry.