Dona Nobis Pacem
If in spite of nagging doubts about the contemporary relevance of certain of its teachings, people go on reading the Manas —which clearly they do—it must be because the text offers them something. The most common articulation of that "something" which I heard from devotees was that their involvement with the epic brought them santi .
From this alone I get a feeling of santi .
I get mental santi from reciting this.
Such santi as you obtain here cannot be had from any other book.
Santi is normally translated "peace," but what sort of peace? Its Sanskrit root, sam , means "to finish, stop, come to an end, rest, be quiet or calm or satisfied or contented" and also "to appease, allay, alleviate, pacify, calm, soothe, settle."[168]Santi was the state of the Vedic priests after they had finished their sacrificial labors, the peace of extinguished fires and subdued passions, the equilibrium of opposing forces resolving into quiescence. To many Westerners, there may be something disturbingly passive about this kind of equipoise—a relinquishing of the striving and assertiveness necessary for individuation; a denial of what psychoanalyst Sudhir Kakar terms the "historically determined, culturally specific Weltanschauung of the ideal 'healthy' personality cast in the Faustian mould."[169] This view of the perils of "peace" accords well with the judgment, shared by many modern Western and Indian social scientists, of such social institutions as caste and the extended family as "oppressive, in the sense of hindering the growth of such personality traits as 'independence,' 'persistence,' and 'achievement motivation' in the individual."[170] In his study of Hindu personality formation, Kakar does not deny the "oppressive inconsistencies" that Hindu culture shares with other complex societies but chooses to focus on "adaptation rather than on conflict." This necessitates placing the individual in the context of the social group (the extended family or subcaste), for "in India . . . the ideal of psychological wholeness or 'maturity' . . . is quite compatible with an ego which is relatively passive and less differentiated."[171]
"Peace" within such a framework may be of two kinds: the peace that comes from the harmonious balance of social forces—in which the autonomy of the individual is subsumed to the group's need for order; and the peace of final liberation (moksa[*] ), which opts out of the system and breaks away from the wheel of worldly activity to attain a transcendent condition. The "peace of mind" that devotees say they obtain from the Manas resonates with both kinds: the peace of acceptance of the fundamental rightness of things as they imperfectly are, it is also the
peace of recognition of a vital if remote ideal. It is the peace of what we might term "tradition"—a negotiated cease-fire in the eternal battle between real and ideal.