Muslim's training took him through the same network of ninth-century scholarship that produced al-Bukhari, and the overlap between their teachers is part of why their two books, despite real differences in arrangement, agree on the great majority of the material each includes. He travelled to Iraq, the Hejaz, Syria and Egypt over the course of his education, a pattern typical of the hadith scholarship of his generation, in which authority was built by collecting direct oral transmission from as many recognised carriers of the tradition as a scholar could reach rather than by working from written compilations alone.
The most widely repeated story about his death, that he wore himself out testing a hadith against a basket of dates one at a time until the basket was empty, belongs to the same genre of anecdote that surrounds al-Bukhari's reported feats of memory: whether or not the detail is literally accurate, it is preserved because it illustrates, in a memorable form, the intensity of textual scrutiny his generation of scholars was understood to have practised as a matter of course.
His book's influence outlasted the immediate circle of his students. Commentaries on Sahih Muslim became a standard genre of their own within a few generations, and the introduction in which he laid out his method for judging narrators is still read as one of the clearest early statements of the discipline hadith criticism became.