Prostrations look like worship and are not, in the tradition's own account: there is no one receiving them, and the Buddha explicitly refused divine status. What the practice works on is the practitioner — the physical enactment of lowering the self, repeated until the reflex of self-importance loosens. In Tibetan Buddhism the preliminary practices require 100,000 of them, often performed full-length along the ground across whole pilgrimage routes, and teachers are frank that the body is being used to reach something the mind will not hand over by argument.