The lower Manhattan resident was often referred to as the group's spiritual core. He was a practicing Buddhist and staunch supporter of Tibetan independence who helped organize the Tibetan Freedom Concerts of the late 1990s.



Yauch is survived by wife Dechen Wangdu and a 13-year-old daughter, Tenzin Losel Yauch.



When Yauch first announced his diagnosis in a July 2009 video message on the band's website, he told fans his doctors were optimistic.



"It's only localized in this one area, and it's not in a place that affects my voice," he said, adding that he would undergo both surgery and radiation. "So it's a little bit of a setback. It's a pain in the a--. But this is something that's very treatable, and in most cases, they're able to completely get rid of it."



A year later he asked fans to meditate with him "to smash apart all the cancer cells" in the world.



"We are visualizing taking the energy away from the cancer and then sending it back at the cancer as lighting bolts that will break apart the DNA and RNA of the cells," he wrote in a letter to fans on the group's mailing list.



News of his death hit friends hard.



"Struggling to find words to describe the grief I feel over the passing of MCA," rapper Talib Kweli, who toured with the Beastie Boys in 2004, wrote on Twitter.



"The Beastie Boys changed my life. For real," he tweeted. "Prayers going out to the whole family."



Even Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz weighed in: "Brooklyn — the Creative Capital of New York City — has made so many great contributions to music and the arts, and in the world of hip hop, they don't come much bigger than Brooklyn native Adam 'MCA' Yauch and his fellow Beastie Boys," he said in a statement.



ndillon@nydailynews.com