Al-Bukhari's later years were shaped by conflict rather than by quiet scholarship. Sources describe a dispute in Nishapur, where he had taught for a period, over a theological question concerning the created or uncreated nature of the spoken Quran, a controversy that divided ninth-century Islamic scholarship more broadly. Accounts differ on the exact charge and the exact opponents, but the outcome is agreed: he was pushed out of the city and, according to the same tradition, faced further difficulty when he returned to his native Bukhara, where the local governor is said to have demanded he teach hadith privately to the ruler's household rather than publicly, a request he refused.
He withdrew to Khartank, a village near Samarkand, and died there in 870, a scholar whose authority over the next thousand years of Sunni Islam was already effectively settled while he himself ended his career at the edges of the learned world rather than at its centre. That contrast, between the book's eventual standing and the compiler's own difficult final years, is a detail the biographical tradition preserves rather than smooths over.
His students carried the method forward directly. Muslim ibn al-Hajjaj studied under him and adopted the same discipline of narrator criticism for what became the second of the two Sahihs, and generations of later scholars wrote commentaries that treated Sahih al-Bukhari's arrangement, and not only its content, as a subject for study in its own right.