The Beatles' famous trip to India in 1968, where they meditated under the guidance of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, was largely Harrison's show. He and Patti had become devotees of the religious leader and arranged for the band to spend time at the maharishi's ashram in the Himalayan foothills. Other celebrities--Mia Farrow, the singer Donovan, Mike Love of the Beach Boys--went on retreat as well, and the episode is remembered as one of the pivotal, if oddest, events of the Flower Power '60s. Indisputably beautiful fruits of the getaway were the songs composed there. John said he wrote "hundreds"; Paul came up with at least 15; and most of the Beatles' White Album and Abbey Road were conceived in Rishikesh. George contributed four songs, including the anticarnivore screed Piggies and the gorgeous Here Comes the Sun and Something. With more than 150 versions recorded, Something is the second-most-covered Beatles song after Yesterday, but a measure of Harrison's obscurity within the band is that Frank Sinatra used to introduce Something as his favorite Lennon-McCartney tune.

Such confusion would end with the band's acrimonious breakup, announced in 1970. For Harrison, the split opened the door to artistic liberation. He had been piling up songs for months--years--songs that couldn't be squeezed onto Beatles albums, brimful as they were with Lennon and McCartney's efforts. Now, in a work that is the very definition of magnum opus, Harrison poured forth the three-disc set All Things Must Pass. (A 30th-anniversary reissue earlier this year only confirmed that this was Harrison's masterpiece. )

The bulky boxed set went to No. 1 in 1971, propelled by such hits as My Sweet Lord and What Is Life. Harrison had found a new spiritual mentor, Srila Prabhupada of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness, and Hindu sentiments and sounds permeate the record, further spurring sitar sales and causing many listeners to investigate Eastern religions. In the early aftermath of the Beatles demise, Harrison, the revelation, rivaled Lennon or McCartney as a pop icon, and Shankar realized his friend might be the perfect front man for a good cause. In August 1971, Harrison and friends Dylan, Starr, Leon Russell and Eric Clapton staged two concerts at New York City's Madison Square Garden to raise money for the flood- and famine-ravaged Indian subcontinent. The Concert for Bangladesh established Harrison as a pioneering rock philanthropist, and set a model for future celebrity fund-raising efforts like Live Aid, the We Are the World record and the Concert for New York City, starring McCartney, at Madison Square Garden six weeks ago for victims of the World Trade Center attacks.

With George now front and center, his fans got to know him better. It became evident that the quiet Beatle was, in fact, possessed of the same dry, sarcastic, Liverpudlian wit that Lennon was known for. (During the Beatles' recording session with producer George Martin back in 1962, he asked them, "Is there anything you're not happy about?" It was George, not John, after all, who famously answered, "Well, there's your tie, for starters.") Harrison, with individual success, seemed more at ease, and his geniality throughout the 1970s saw his image evolve to that of the happy mystic.

Clapton, along with Dylan, became one of Harrison's best friends, and it's rather astonishing that this friendship was not destroyed when Patti became Mrs. Clapton in 1979, two years after she and George divorced and a year after George married the American Olivia Arias. By the late 1970s Harrison was as much entrepreneur as musician. He had started his own record label (Dark Horse, in 1974) and his own movie-production company, HandMade Films, which he set up to help his pal Eric Idle finish his Monty Python film Life of Brian. Other HandMade productions included the 1981 fantasy Time Bandits and the 1986 noirish drama Mona Lisa, which launched actor Bob Hoskins. Harrison's cinema dabblings also included a cameo in Idle's faux rockumentary All You Need Is Cash, about the Rutles--the "Prefab Four." According to George, the parody told the Beatles story "much better than the usual boring documentary."

Scared into near reclusion by Mark David Chapman's killing of Lennon in December 1980, Harrison spent most of his time meditating, music making, gardening and watching Formula One races on the telly at Friar Park, his extraordinary estate in Henley-on-Thames, and at his hideaway on the Hawaiian island of Maui. He ventured out occasionally to record and play with the Traveling Wilburys, a supergroup that included Dylan, Tom Petty and others. But various legal battles took up even more of his time. In 1976 he had to pay $587,000 for "subconsciously plagiarizing" the old Chiffons hit He's So Fine in his melody for My Sweet Lord. In 1991, he brought a seven-figure defamation-of-character suit when the tabloid the Globe published a story calling him a "Big Nazi Fan." And in 1996 he won an $11.6 million judgment against his former business partner in HandMade films, Denis O'Brien, for not assuming his agreed-upon share of the company's debt. That same year Harrison asked authorities to investigate a series of death threats.

None of those threats were proved to have come from Michael Abram, but it was Abram, a 33-year-old Beatle obsessive from a Liverpool suburb, who, in the dead of night on Dec. 30, 1999, got past the alarms and razor wire at Friar Park and broke into the Harrisons' mansion. George suffered an inch-deep stab wound to his chest before Olivia knocked Abram down with a bedside lamp. Harrison recovered, and Abram was sent to a mental institution.

While Harrison was able to survive the pressures of being a Beatle and an assault by a maniac, he couldn't beat cancer. But he made the passage to death easier for himself by believing so passionately for so long in a life after this one. Said his old friend Mia Farrow last week: "One of the things that was so inspiring was his lifelong search to know his God. And if God exists, I don't doubt that George has a place near him. " If she's right, Harrison is happy. He may have been scared of the adoring crowds, but he was not afraid to let go.