Maṅgalācaraṇa — Invoking Auspiciousness

Mangalacarana, the auspicious invocation that opens Kalyana-Kalpataru, holds two Sanskrit songs standing apart from the Bengali verse that makes up nearly all of the rest of the book. Bhaktivinoda Thakura published Kalyana-Kalpataru, the Wish-Fulfilling Tree of Auspiciousness, in 1881, more than a decade before Saranagati and Gitavali, making it one of his earliest major songbooks, and its opening section follows the traditional convention of beginning a devotional work with invocation in Sanskrit, the classical language of Vaishnava scripture, before the book proper continues in Bengali. The first, eight-verse song offers obeisance to the moon of the Vrndavana forest; the second, at twenty-two verses by far the longest single song anywhere in Kalyana-Kalpataru, addresses Caitanya Mahaprabhu as patita-pabana, purifier of the fallen, a title Bhaktivinoda returns to across many of his later songbooks as well. Its unusual length for an opening invocation lets it survey the whole devotional landscape the rest of the book will move through — instruction, realization, and the increase of spiritual emotion — before the shorter, more focused sections that follow actually begin.