"Shantih, shantih, shantih" literally means "inner peace" in Sanskrit. The words are uttered at the end of prayers in the Upshanishads, a series of Hindu religious texts. Eliot himself translated the word in Christian terms as meaning the peace that passes all understanding—a gift that comes to us from the grace of God.

These words end The Waste Land, and critics argue over whether they mean a comforting, transcendent peace as the narrator comes to grips with reality and begins to pull together and re-form the fragments of civilization in his mind, or if they simply represent his resignation to despair. They are appropriate to the setting at the end, which takes place by the Ganges river in India. The Ganges is a body of water associated with Hindu religious faith and renewal.

It is significant that Eliot pulls Indian culture into his text. Many have interpreted this to mean that Eliot is saying that Western civilization should look for inspiration to the wisdom of Asia as the West struggles to make sense of intellectual loss of certainty in the wake of World War I's devastation.

The words are part of the fragmentary end of the poem that includes a quote from Dante's Purgatory, reminding people to remember the poet's pain, a quote about London Bridge falling down which possibly alludes to collapse of Western civilization, and the words

These fragments I have shored against my ruins.

These words of shoring up fragments of civilization and the ending on the repetition of Shanith, or peace, might suggest that the poet has found a note of hope.