>namotassabhagavatoarahatosammaasambuddhassa
>
>Dear friends,
>
>From time to time, I have come across the niggahita in
>sammaa-sa(.m)buddhassa. I wonder if someone could comment on
>this. Is it simply an artifact of sam+budh? Does it change the
>meaning in a subtle way?
>

Hi,

This has been answered quite fully, but one last
thing is that in Indian scripts it's often
possible to save some space and avoid a ligature
by writing things like sa.mbuddha, sa.mgha,
pa.mca (pañca], pa.m.dita (pa.n.dita). This
happens a lot in devanagari dictionaries of
Sanskrit for example. You can't see the space
saving in a romanized transliteration, but it's
dramatic in devanagari, a bit less so, but still
there, in sinhala characters. In cases like that
the .m is to be read as a shorthand for the
appropriate nasal (the nasal of the same
class(vagga) as the following consonant) not as a
true anusvara/niggahita.

I'm not 100% sure how these conventions work in
practice in pali mss, but I wouldn't treat the
difference as changing the meaning in any way.
I'd just treat it as an orthographical variant.
When a consonant follows it won't affect the
metre either (as far as I understand it). It will
affect the metre before a vowel however.

best regards,

/Rett