George Harrison and the Tao Te Ching: The Beatle Who Loved Taoism

I was in a Beijing record store — one of those cramped hutong shops where the vinyl is stacked in milk crates and the owner is always smoking near the back — when I found an old copy of All Things Must Pass. The cover was faded. The price was thirty kuai. I bought it because I had just finished reading the Tao Te Ching that morning and the title felt like a response.

I did not know at the time that George Harrison had read the same book.

The Quietest Beatle

Harrison is famous for his Hinduism — the sitar, Ravi Shankar, the Maharishi, the pilgrimage to India that briefly turned the entire Beatles entourage into meditators. But his spiritual reading was broader than most people realize. According to his widow Olivia and several biographers, the Tao Te Ching was one of the texts he returned to across decades.

This makes sense to me. Harrison was always the Beatle least comfortable with Beatlemania — the one who seemed to want, more than anything, to be left alone to make music and think about things. The Tao Te Ching is, among other things, a sustained argument for stepping back from the noise and letting the river carry you. I imagine Harrison reading Chapter 8 — “the highest good is like water, which benefits all things and does not compete” — and recognizing his own deepest instinct.

The Song That Echoes the Tao

“All Things Must Pass” is not a Taoist song in the explicit way “My Sweet Lord” is a Hindu song. But the sensibility — all things must pass, nothing is permanent, do not cling to what cannot last — is essentially Taoist.

The Tao is observed most clearly in patterns of change. Water becomes vapor. Vapor becomes cloud. Cloud becomes rain. Nothing holds still. The Tao Te Ching returns to this idea constantly — that permanence is an illusion, that the wise person flows with change rather than resisting it. Harrison, who lost bandmates, friendships, and eventually his own life to forces he could not control, seems to have understood this deeply.

I remember listening to that song on the subway in Beijing — Line 10, heading south from the university district, the car half-empty on a Sunday afternoon — and thinking about the difference between accepting impermanence and being flattened by it. The song is not sad. It is, in the Taoist sense, accurate: the sun does not have to set. It does anyway. The wise response is neither resistance nor despair but a kind of quiet attention.

Non-Contention and the Later Years

Harrison’s later years were marked by something rare for a former Beatle: a genuine pulling back from the public. He gardened. He made music at his own pace. He stopped chasing. The interviews from this period show a man who seems to have made peace with being who he is, which is to say: a man who stopped forcing.

This is Wu Wei in practice — not as a philosophy you study but as a way you eventually become, after enough life has happened to you. Harrison was attacked in his own home in 1999 — stabbed multiple times by an intruder — and survived. When asked about it later, he described the experience with something close to detachment: not indifference, but a refusal to let the violence define him. This is not something most people could do. It is something a person who has spent decades reading the Tao Te Ching might be equipped to try.

What Harrison Gave Taoism

Harrison never wrote a book about Taoism. He never taught it. What he did — through his music, through the visible arc of his life — was demonstrate something that the Tao Te Ching describes but rarely dramatizes: what it looks like when someone actually lives the principles. Quietly. Without announcing it. With a garden and a guitar and a decreasing need to be seen.

I keep his records in the same room as my Tao Te Ching translations. This is not an accident.

For another musician-philosopher connection, see Is Bruce Lee a Taoist?. For the Hindu text that shaped Harrison’s spiritual life alongside the Tao Te Ching, see Tao Te Ching vs Bhagavad Gita.