The Kalamas lived in a town that teachers kept passing through, and each one praised his own teaching and ran down everyone else's. They couldn't tell who was right, so when the Buddha came through, they asked him who to believe. He answered with a list of reasons that aren't good enough on their own: hearsay, tradition, scripture, a clever argument, a speaker who seems capable, even the fact that someone is your own teacher. What counts, he said, is what a teaching does when you actually live it, with wise people as a check on you. Then he showed them how. He asked whether greed, when it shows up in a person, helps or harms, and let them answer from their own lives. You've got teachers too, just smaller ones: your mother, a podcast host, the guy at the gym. Pick one thing you do only because one of them said so, and this morning, look at what it's actually done for you since you started.