He received his degree in medicine from Harvard University in 1874 and continued his medical studies in Europe for five years under Louis Pasteur.

His primary interest was bacteriology, but when his father pressured him to follow him into surgery, Bigelow abandoned a medical career altogether.

With authorization from the Japanese government, Bigelow, Morse, and Fenollosa, were able to explore parts of Japan closed to outside viewers for centuries.

[8] In traveling through Japan and forming their collections, Bigelow and his Boston colleagues were helped by one of Fenollosa's students, Okakura Kakuzō.

When the museum moved to a new building in 1909, a gallery and courtyard garden designed to mimic a temple and its forecourt was built to display Japanese sculpture.

Next, the individual moves to a level of celestial experience and finally is able to "return to the unconditioned consciousness from which all things emerge.

"[14] Bigelow's contemporaries compared his relationship to the Japanese monk who instructed him in Buddhism as that of "a filial child" to a "benevolent father.

"[15] Historian T.J. Jackson Lears has analyzed Bigelow's embrace of Buddhism as "leaving a stern father for a benign Ajari [teacher].

[17] Bigelow has been described as "at once an epicure and a mystic, who professed an ascetic religion and wore beautiful Charvet haberdashery.

[citation needed] When George Cabot Lodge, the young poet he had chosen as his spiritual son to inherit his island estate, died there at the age of thirty-five, William Bigelow was heartbroken.