The lyrics are a rendering of chapter 47[1] from the Taoist Tao Te Ching, which he set to music on the recommendation of Juan Mascaró, a Sanskrit scholar who had translated the passage in his 1958 book Lamps of Fire.

[2][3] Mascaró had taken part in a debate, televised on The Frost Programme on 4 October 1967,[4] during which Harrison and John Lennon discussed the merits of Transcendental Meditation with an audience of academics and religious leaders.

[5][6] In a subsequent letter to Harrison, dated 16 November, Mascaró expressed the hope that they might meet again before the Beatles departed for India,[7] where the group were to study meditation with their guru, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.

"[7][nb 1] Harrison wrote the song during a period when he had undertaken his first musical project outside the Beatles, composing the soundtrack to the Joe Massot-directed film Wonderwall,[14][15] and continued to study the Indian sitar, partly under the tutelage of Ravi Shankar.

[2]After "Within You Without You", "The Inner Light" was the second composition to fully reflect Harrison's immersion in Eastern spiritual concepts, particularly meditation,[19][20] an interest that had spread to his Beatles bandmates[21][22] and to the group's audience and peers.

[25] Theologian Dale Allison describes the song as a "hymn" to quietism and comments that, in their attempt to "relativize and disparage knowledge of the external world", the words convey Harrison's enduring worldview.

[26] Author John Winn notes that Harrison had presaged the message of "The Inner Light" in an August 1967 interview, when he told New York DJ Murray Kaufman: "The more you learn, the more you know that you don't know anything at all.

[31] Harrison's progression within the genre reflected his concept for the Wonderwall soundtrack[32] – namely, that the assignment allowed him to create an "anthology" of Indian music[33][34] and present a diverse range of styles and instrumentation.

[41] In a further departure from Harrison's previous forays into Indian music, both of which made extensive use of single-chord drone, the melody allows for formal chord changes: over the verses, the dominant E♭ major alternates with F minor, before a move to A♭ over the line "The farther one travels the less one knows".

[41] Having used London-based Indian musicians from the Asian Music Circle on "Love You To" and "Within You Without You",[44] Harrison recorded "The Inner Light" in India with some of the country's foremost contemporary classical players.

[51] The musicians at the sessions were recruited by Shambhu Das, who had assisted in Harrison's sitar tuition on his previous visit to Bombay, in 1966,[52] and Vijay Dubey, the head of A&R for HMV Records in India.

[53] According to Lavezzoli and Beatles biographer Kenneth Womack, the line-up on the track was Aashish Khan (sarod), Mahapurush Misra (pakhavaj), Hanuman Jadev (shehnai), Hariprasad Chaurasia (bansuri) and Rijram Desad (harmonium).

[12] He highlights the manner in which the sarod, traditionally a lead instrument in North India, is played by Khan: staccato-style in the upper register, creating a sound more typical of acoustic guitar.

[31] Everett writes that Lennon's admiration for the track was evident from his subsequent creation of the song "Julia" through "a very parallel process" – in that instance, by adapting a work by Kahlil Gibran.

[76] While Chris Welch of Melody Maker expressed doubts about the hit potential of the A-side,[77][78] Billboard magazine commented on the aptness of "The Inner Light", given the band's concurrent "meditation spell".

[84] In the description of author and critic David Quantick, whereas "Lady Madonna" represented a departure from the Beatles' psychedelic productions of the previous year, "The Inner Light" was an "accurate indication" of the group's mindset in Rishikesh.

[85] Paul Saltzman, a Canadian film-maker who had been inspired by the Beatles' adoption of Indian musical and philosophical themes,[37] joined the band at the Maharishi's ashram and recalls hearing the song there for the first time.

[69] Schaffner paired it with "Within You Without You" as raga rock songs that "feature haunting, exquisitely lovely melodies", and as two pieces that could have been among Harrison's "greatest achievements" had they been made with his bandmates' participation.

[101] Ian MacDonald likened the song's "studied innocence and exotic sweetness" to recordings by the Incredible String Band and concluded: "'The Inner Light' is both spirited and charming – one of its author's most attractive pieces.

Harrison's uncharacteristically warm vocal weaves in and around the delicate, almost fragile, melody to deliver a simple testimony to the power of meditation ..."[103] With regard to the song's influence, Inglis recognises Harrison's espousal of Eastern spirituality as "a serious and important development that reflected popular music's increasing maturity", and a statement that prepared rock audiences for later religious pronouncements by Pete Townshend, Carlos Santana, John McLaughlin, Cat Stevens and Bob Dylan.

considers "The Inner Light" to be one of its composer's "most successful marriages of raga and rock" and, through Harrison's introduction of instruments such as sarod, shehnai and pakhavaj, a key recording in the evolution of the 1980s world music genre.

[105] While admiring the song's transcendent qualities, Everett quotes the ethnomusicologist David Reck, who wrote in 1988: "Most memorable is the sheer simplicity and straightforwardness of the haunting modal melody, somehow capturing perfectly the mood and truth and aphoristic essence of the lyrics.

[134] Lynne and Shankar were accompanied by Harrison's son Dhani (on keyboards and backing vocals) and an ensemble of Indian musicians that included percussionist Tanmoy Bose (on dholak), Rajendra Prasanna (shehnai) and Sunil Gupta (flute).

[138] In June 1992, the American television series Star Trek: The Next Generation aired an episode titled "The Inner Light",[139] which went on to win the Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation.

[140][141] The plot centres on the show's main character, Captain Jean-Luc Picard, temporarily living in a dream-like state on an unfamiliar planet, during which decades elapse relative to a few minutes in reality.