Naminatha is the twenty-first Tirthankara of the present age, venerated as a fully liberated, omniscient teacher. His emblem is the blue lotus. He is honoured among the twenty-four ford-makers of the current avasarpini who each rediscover and reveal the path of non-violence and liberation.
Jain tradition places him in the sacred antiquity of the age, before documented history, and holds that he attained final liberation at Sammeta Shikhar (Shikharji). Beyond his emblem, his name and the traditional framework of the five auspicious life-events, the sources preserve little individuating narrative for the ford-maker.
Naminatha's blue lotus, distinct from the red lotus given to Padmaprabha earlier in the sequence, is one of several instances in which the twenty-four emblems draw on a single recurring plant or animal type differentiated only by colour or by a secondary attribute, a pattern that Jain iconographic manuals record without offering any account of why a given colour or variant was assigned to one ford-maker rather than another among the many who might equally have received it. The blue lotus itself, utpala rather than the red padma, carries its own separate set of associations in the wider Indian symbolic vocabulary that Jain art draws on freely alongside its own distinct doctrinal purposes, a borrowing the tradition itself never comments on directly.