Sumatinatha is the fifth Tirthankara of the present age, his name evoking right understanding or good wisdom (sumati). His emblem is the krauncha bird, a wading bird variously identified as a heron or curlew (some lists render it a goose). Jains venerate him as an omniscient teacher who attained kevala jnana and final liberation, and as one of the twenty-four ford-makers who renew the path across rebirth.
Tradition assigns him, as it does the ford-makers of the early avasarpini, a place in a remote sacred antiquity beyond documented history, and holds that he attained moksha at Sammeta Shikhar (Shikharji). His individuating narrative in the sources is slight beyond the emblem, the name and the traditional life-events.
Like the other ford-makers of this remote span of the avasarpini, Sumatinatha's teaching is understood to restate rather than originate the Jain path: the tradition holds that dharma itself is eternal and that each Tirthankara rediscovers and proclaims it anew for an age that has forgotten it, rather than founding something previously unknown. His kevala jnana, in the Jain account, is total and unmediated, direct perception of every substance across all of time without recourse to the senses, the same claim made for every fully liberated ford-maker in the twenty-four.