VLODROP (Netherlands) - Followers gathered at the Dutch home of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi on Thursday to remember the late guru to the Beatles, who also brought transcendental meditation to the West.

In a tent decorated with pots of roses, daffodils and orchids, the main leaders of the Maharishi's movement addressed an audience of hundreds, praising the life and works of the Indian mystic, who died overnight on Wednesday aged 91.

His funeral will be held in the Indian city of Allahabad on Monday, a spokesman for the group said.

The Maharishi had died peacefully of natural causes at his home and headquarters in Vlodrop, a village in the Netherlands.

On Jan 11, he had announced that his public work was finished and that he would use his remaining time to complete a long-running series of published commentaries on the Veda, the oldest sacred Hindu text.

In Hindi, 'maha' means great and 'rishi' means seer. 'Maharishi' is a title traditionally bestowed on Brahmins. Critics of the yogi say he presented himself with the name, which he was ineligible for because he was from a lower caste.

He was both an entrepreneur and a monk, a spiritual man who sought a world stage from which to espouse the joys of inner happiness.

But his critics called his organisation a cult business enterprise. In the United States, the organisation values its assets at about US$300 million (S$426 million), with its base in Fairfield, Iowa, where it operates a university, the Maharishi University of Management.

The Maharishi originated the Transcendental Meditation movement in 1957 and took it to the US in 1959. Known as TM, it involves reciting a mantra that practitioners say helps the mind stay calm even under pressure.

Since the technique's inception in 1955, the organisation says, it has trained more than 40,000 teachers, taught more than five million people, opened thousands of teaching centres and founded hundreds of schools, colleges and universities.

The visibility and popularity of the organisation can largely be attributed to the Beatles. In 1967, George Harrison took John Lennon and McCartney to hear the Maharishi lecture in London. Soon, Ringo Starr joined them in a seminar for initiates who, for a US$35 fee, received their own mantra. Today, the basic course costs US$2,500.

In 1968, the band, with great publicity, began studying with the Maharishi at his Himalayan ashram in Rishikesh in northern India. They went with their wives, folk singer Donovan, singer Mike Love of the Beach Boys, actress Mia Farrow and Farrow's sister Prudence.

Out of the Beatles' Rishikesh experience came songs such as Across The Universe, which includes the words 'Jai guru deva om', a phrase said to translate roughly to 'I give thanks to Guru Dev', the Maharishi's teacher.

But there, the Maharishi had a falling out with the Beatles after rumours emerged that he was making inappropriate advances on Farrow. Lennon was so angry he wrote a bitter satire, Sexy Sadie, in which he sang: 'Maharishi - what have you done? You made a fool of everyone''.

The Maharishi insisted he had done nothing wrong. Indian spiritualist Deepak Chopra, a disciple of the Maharishi and friend of Harrison, has disputed the Farrow story, saying instead that the Maharishi had become unhappy with the Beatles as they were using drugs. Later in life, the Maharishi refused to discuss the Beatles.

His movement began losing followers in the late 1970s, as people were put off by the organisation's promotion of a more advanced form of TM called Yogic Flying, in which practitioners try to summon a surge of energy to physically lift themselves off the ground. They have never gone beyond the initial stage of flying, described as 'frog hops'.

Mahesh Prasad Varma was born in northern India into a family of scribes. Called Mahesh, he studied physics at Allahabad University, and for the next 13 years, became a student and secretary to a holy man, Swami Brahmananda Saraswati, whom the young disciple Mahesh called Guru Dev.

After the death of his master in 1953, Mahesh went into seclusion in the Himalayan foothills. He emerged two years later and began teaching a system of belief, which grew into the worldwide TM movement.

'It would appear that Maharishi cobbled together his teaching after his master died, when he found himself unemployed and out of grace with the ashram he had worked so long,' said Paul Mason, a critic of the Maharishi and the author of a biography, The Maharishi: The Biography Of The Man Who Gave Transcendental Meditation To The World. 'He reinvented himself and became a 'maharishi' and wanted to be seen as a messiah.'

Since 1990, the Maharishi had lived in Vlodrop with about 50 of his adherents.

Concerned about his fragile health, he had secluded himself in two rooms of the wooden pavilion he built in the compound, speaking only by video to aides around the world and even to his closest advisers in the same building.

His body will be returned to India after Thursday's memorial ceremony in Vlodrop.

NYT, LAT-WP, AP, Reuters

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