He was born at the beginning of 120 AH.
He heard hadith from Sulayman al-Taymi, Hisham ibn ʿUrwah, ʿAtaʾ ibn al-Saʾib, Sulayman al-Aʿmash, Husayn the teacher, Humayd al-Tawil, Khuthaym ibn ʿIraq, Ismaʿil ibn Abi Khalid, ʿUbayd Allah ibn ʿUmar, Yahya ibn Saʿid al-Ansari, Ibn ʿAwn, Ibn Abi ʿArubah, Shuʿbah, al-Thawri, Akhdar ibn ʿAjlan, Israʾil ibn Musa—who later settled in India—Ashʿath ibn ʿAbd al-Malik al-Humrani, Ashʿath ibn ʿAbd Allah al-Huddani, Bahz ibn Hakim, Jaʿfar ibn Muhammad, Hatim ibn Abi Ṣaghirah, Habib ibn al-Shahid, Hajjaj ibn Abi ʿUthman al-Ṣawwaf, Zakariyya ibn Abi Zaʾidah, ʿAbd Allah ibn Saʿid ibn Abi Hind, ʿAbd al-Rahman ibn Harmalah al-Aslami, ʿAbd al-Malik ibn Abi Sulayman, ʿUthman ibn al-Aswad al-Makki, Fudayl ibn Ghazwan, Muhammad ibn ʿAjlan, and many others.
He devoted himself to this discipline with the utmost diligence, travelled in its pursuit, outshone his contemporaries, and became the final authority for memorisation. He spoke authoritatively on hidden defects (ʿilal) and on narrator evaluation, and leading hadith masters such as Musaddad, ʿAli, and al-Fallas graduated under him. In subsidiary legal matters he inclined to the school of Abu Hanifah—as far as has reached us—whenever no explicit textual evidence was available.
Among those who transmitted from him were Sufyan, Shuʿbah, Muʿtamir ibn Sulayman—though they were his own teachers—ʿAbd al-Rahman ibn Mahdi, ʿAffan, Musaddad, his son Muhammad ibn Yahya, ʿUbayd Allah al-Qawariri, Abu Bakr ibn Abi Shaybah, ʿAli, Yahya, Ahmad, Ishaq, ʿAmr ibn ʿAli, Bundar, Ibn Mathanna, Muhammad ibn Hatim al-Samin, Sulayman al-Shadhakuni, ʿUbayd Allah ibn Saʿid al-Sarkhasi, Yahya ibn Hakim al-Muqawwam, ʿUmar ibn Shabbah, Nasr ibn ʿAli, Muhammad ibn ʿAbd Allah al-Mukhrimi, Ahmad ibn Sinan al-Qaṭṭān, Ishaq al-Kawsaj, and Zayd ibn Akhzam.