  We consider the stimulated Raman transition between two long-lived states via
multiple intermediate states, such as between hyperfine ground states in the
alkali-metal atoms. We present a concise treatment of the general, multilevel,
off-resonant case, and we show how the lightshift emerges naturally in this
approach. We illustrate our results by application to alkali-metal atoms and we
make specific reference to cesium. We comment on some artifacts, due solely to
the geometrical overlap of states, which are relevant to existing experiments.
