Swami Satchidananda, the yoga master and guru whose message of spiritual unity brought solace to the Woodstock generation and attracted followers from Hollywood to Virginia, died Monday in India. He was 87.

The swami lived in Yogaville, Va., a 1,000-acre community he founded under the Blue Ridge Mountains near Charlottesville in 1979. He was in his native South India to address a peace conference when he died suddenly from a thoracic aneurysm, a Yogaville spokesperson said.

Brought to America in 1966 by psychedelic artist Peter Max, he was part of a wave of Hindu teachers in the 1960s and ’70s who found among the nation’s youth a curiosity about Eastern mysticism, music and meditation.

He became known as the “Woodstock guru” after he opened that epochal music festival in 1969 by declaring music “the celestial sound that controls the whole universe.”

He gradually shifted his base of operations from Sri Lanka to the United States and opened branches around the world of his Integral Yoga Institute.

Among his disciples are the singer-composer Carole King, who donated 600 acres to his Virginia ashram, jazz pianist Alice Coltrane and actors Diane Ladd and Laura Dern.

He studied with some of India’s greatest sages, adopting Swami Sivananda as his guru in 1949. Four years later he left for Sri Lanka, where he opened a branch of Sivananda’s organization, the Divine Life Society. He remained for several years, opening an orphanage and medical clinic and joining a movement to welcome untouchables to Hindu temples.

His Integral Yoga teaches Hatha Yoga and other methods, as well as meditation, chanting and cleansing practices.