Sariputra came to the Buddha already looking. He and his friend Maudgalyayana were students of another teacher and had agreed that whichever of them found the deathless first would tell the other. Sariputra met a monk named Assaji in the street, was struck by his bearing, asked what his teacher taught, and received a single verse: of things that arise from a cause, the Buddha has told the cause and also the cessation. He is said to have understood immediately, and went straight to fetch his friend.
His characteristic gift is analysis. Where other discourses report what the Buddha said, a substantial number report Sariputra taking a compressed statement and unfolding it, sorting it into its parts, defining the terms and putting it in order for the community. He is the named speaker of several of the most systematic texts in the canon, and the Abhidharma tradition, which arranges the teaching into an exhaustive analytical scheme, treats him as its origin. The Buddha is recorded as saying that Sariputra could turn the wheel of the teaching exactly as he did.
He died a few months before the Buddha. Having asked permission, he went back to the village of his birth to die in the room where he was born, so that his mother, who had never accepted his going forth, could see it, and the tradition says she was converted at the end.