[warrgazur]

2 cents,

Gotama's teachings never advised to undertake rites and rituals or to worship understood as a humiliation but rites and rituals appeared with the outcome of traditions.

Seems to me, at the risk of being wrong, that rites, rituals and worshiping became more and more important as traditions evolved from Theravada to Mahayana and beyond.

Not pretending to judge this but to understand this fact it looks like worshiping is a central aspect in some traditions and for some practitioners just because they have adopted them and it is central due to a kind of cohesive element needed to maintain a coherent practice in a given Sangha.

It also seems that for those that practice not through a tradition but directly from Gotama teachings do not need the aid of rite, ritual and worshiping.

But, for example, the case of Soto Zen is highly ritualistic. Manners, gestures, symbols, movements are ways to tame the mind, to settle it and to prepare it to wise discernment and an aid for recollection.

The aspect of worship as an act of surrender can be appreciated from a different approach as a recognition of an ultimate truth; a bigger truth than that hold by selfness or the idea of a self.

When one has given up the idea of a self, IMO, there is surrender. Personal experience when first the Four Noble Truths were "touched" and truly understood, a sort of surrendering happend. To give up all the burden of misconceptions stored in the mind from years of accumulated ignorance necessarily leads to prise deeply the word of Gotama Buddha touching the delicate line of devotional feeling.