Daily · Dreamtime

“Maharishi — what have you done? You made a fool of everyone.”

That was the opening line of a sarcastic song about Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, who died on Tuesday, that John Lennon wrote in 1968, not long after the Beatles abruptly left the maharishi’s ashram in Rishikesh, India, and declared themselves no longer his spiritual disciples. It wasn’t released that way. In the end the other Beatles, particularly George Harrison, argued that whatever disagreements they had with the maharishi, his work demanded respect, and it was unfair (and perhaps libelous) to be so blunt.

Lennon retreated, changing the song’s title, and the references to the maharishi in its lyrics, to “Sexy Sadie,” the form in which it can be heard on “The Beatles,” commonly called the White Album.

“Sexy Sadie,” for all its implicit anger, was part of a huge trove of songs Lennon, Paul McCartney and George Harrison wrote during and just after their visit to Rishikesh. Whatever shortcomings the Beatles’ interaction with the maharishi may have had, the experience — which lasted only eight months, from August 1967 to April 1968 — seems to have opened a floodgate of creativity and got them out of what threatened to be a creative rut.

LONDON — A mysterious three-part painting that is viewed as a Francis Bacon masterpiece sold for $46.1 million Wednesday night at a Christie’s auction here, countering expectations of a record price for his work.

Three bidders competed for the work, the “Triptych 1974-77,” which was offered by a private collector at a sale of postwar and Impressionist art. The buyer was not identified, but people in the packed salesroom said the winning bid had been submitted by a young man with long hair who was carrying a leather jacket and spoke English.

The hammer price was slightly below the auction’s presale estimate of $50 million to $70 million for the painting as well as Bacon’s previous record. In May his “Study From Innocent X” (1962) was sold for a record $52.6 million at Sotheby’s in New York.

The final price for this towering triptych, including Christie’s commission, was $51.6 million, the auction house said.

Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, who introduced transcendental meditation to the West and gained fame in the 1960s as the spiritual guru to the Beatles, died Tuesday at his home and headquarters in Vlodrop, the Netherlands. He is believed to have been in his 90s. Steven Yellin, a spokesman for the organization, confirmed the Maharishi’s death but did not give a cause.

On Jan. 11, the Maharishi 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.

The Maharishi was both an entrepreneur and a monk, a spiritual man who sought a world stage from which to espouse the joys of inner happiness. His critics called his organization a cult business enterprise. And in the press, in the 1960s and ’70s, he was often dismissed as a hippie mystic, the “Giggling Guru,” recognizable in the familiar image of him laughing, sitting cross-legged in a lotus position on a deerskin, wearing a white silk dhoti with a garland of flowers around his neck beneath an oily, scraggly beard.

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.