What is the passage mainly about?

The limits of any single, fixed point of view. (The third paragraph states it: the chapter is about the limits of a fixed viewpoint, not about proving the world unreal.)

How does the passage in the Zhuangzi end?

With a question rather than a lesson. (The first paragraph says the passage ends with a question rather than a lesson, and then gives the question.)

Why can certainty not decide between the two states?

Because both states felt completely real from the inside. (Inside the dream nothing was missing, and waking felt unmistakable, so the feeling of certainty appears in both.)

In this passage, imitation means

a copy that stands in for the real thing. (The butterfly did not feel like a copy of anything; the sentence contrasts imitation with being completely a butterfly.)

The Butterfly And The Sleeper: Level 4 Reading Comprehension Questions

A short story closes one of the chapters of the Zhuangzi, a Chinese text from roughly the fourth century BCE. The writer dreams that he is a butterfly, drifting and content, with no awareness at all of being a man. Then he wakes, unmistakably himself. The passage ends with a question rather than a lesson: was he a man who dreamed of a butterfly, or is he now a butterfly dreaming that it is a man?

Read quickly, this looks like simple doubt about what is real. Read slowly, it makes a different point. Inside the dream, nothing was missing. The butterfly did not feel like an imitation of something else; it was completely a butterfly. The difficulty is that certainty arrived in both states, so certainty cannot serve as the judge between them.

The chapter is about the limits of a fixed viewpoint. Every position feels like the center when you are standing in it. Zhuangzi does not conclude that nothing is real. He suggests that the boundary between things is drawn by the one who is looking, and that a mind able to move between positions sees more than a mind that has settled into one.

Comprehension questions